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Kamikaze L'Amour
To start off the new century, rock sensation Ryder fakes his own death and checks into a sanitarium. Three weeks later, he takes off for San Francisco, where his first sight is a mangrove swamp that's the new northern tip of the Amazon rain forest.
The surreal jungle is more appealing to Ryder than the media-overloaded rock world, and the fractal wilderness draws Ryder to it in search of such exotic flora and fauna as his identity, the true nature of sound and light, and that elusive bloom called happiness.
Kamikaze L'Amour is a fantastic melange, an experimental symphony resonating in a Ballardian landscape through which sleepwalkers, hustlers, refugees, and soldiers search for meaning in an America transformed into a synesthetic dream.
The surreal jungle is more appealing to Ryder than the media-overloaded rock world, and the fractal wilderness draws Ryder to it in search of such exotic flora and fauna as his identity, the true nature of sound and light, and that elusive bloom called happiness.
Kamikaze L'Amour is a fantastic melange, an experimental symphony resonating in a Ballardian landscape through which sleepwalkers, hustlers, refugees, and soldiers search for meaning in an America transformed into a synesthetic dream.
244 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1995
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323 people want to read
About the author
Richard Kadrey
131 books3,567 followersRichard Kadrey is a writer and freelance musician living in Pittsburgh, best known for his Sandman Slim novels. His work has been nominated for the Locus and BSFA awards. Kadrey's newest books are The Secrets of Insects, released in August 2023; The Dead Take the A Train (with Cassandra Khaw), released in September 2023; The Pale House Devil, released in September 2023.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
November 19, 2025
I'll start this by saying, I'm coming to believe anything written by Kadrey is worth reading, because even if the story isn't completely cooked—as with this one—Kadrey gets a pass just for his narrative voice.
But, from what I understand, this is his first novel and while all the hallmarks of his later writing are here, none of this quite gels. Aside from the opening, Ryder has very little agency throughout the entire story—which I also believe is the point—and there's an extended trek through the rainforest that is California in the latter half that goes on far too long.
Overall, the set up is great—rockstar is sick of his life and bails out, while the world is being consumed by a viral Amazonian rainforest. Anyone who's read any Kadrey knows that California—and especially Los Angeles—is as much a character in his novels as his characters are, but he can be a little too obsessed with delivering all the details of his own iterations of that place.
This is a Hunter S. Thompson travelogue with William Gibson in the driver's seat. It's math, medicine, music, and madness. It's Kadrey through and through, but there's just wasn't quite enough story here for me.
But, from what I understand, this is his first novel and while all the hallmarks of his later writing are here, none of this quite gels. Aside from the opening, Ryder has very little agency throughout the entire story—which I also believe is the point—and there's an extended trek through the rainforest that is California in the latter half that goes on far too long.
Overall, the set up is great—rockstar is sick of his life and bails out, while the world is being consumed by a viral Amazonian rainforest. Anyone who's read any Kadrey knows that California—and especially Los Angeles—is as much a character in his novels as his characters are, but he can be a little too obsessed with delivering all the details of his own iterations of that place.
This is a Hunter S. Thompson travelogue with William Gibson in the driver's seat. It's math, medicine, music, and madness. It's Kadrey through and through, but there's just wasn't quite enough story here for me.
June 11, 2020
Like a younger sibling to Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (in fact, that's how this book was pitched to me by the friend who recommended it). What I enjoyed most about Kamikaze L'Amour was its rambling prouse that really fit the mindset of the protagonist telling the story. The descriptions of how nature took over are vivid, reminiscent of JG Ballard's The Drowned World. Also, I am affected by synesthesia, something I've experienced all my life, so I really related with the main character who experiences his physical surroundings through emotional tones. Richard Kadrey nailed it when it came to describing the sensation of hearing colors and seeing music. Plus his character has really good taste in music. I enjoyed Dhalgren. I enjoyed Naked Lunch. There's a correlation there somewhere.
August 21, 2011
Meh. Interesting idea, but it never went anywhere or had any kind of focus.
March 12, 2018
This is one of Richard Kadrey's first books. And one he's not very fond of.
In this book we follow a rock and roll musician,Ryder, who faked his death to get away from fame. Oh, and by the way, he can see sounds. He's on the search for a city of lights. Did I mention that the Amazon jungle has taken over San Francisco and Ryder's girlfriend is a rollerblading crazy lady?
This book has moments of poetic descriptions, a depth of feeling not readily found in most books as well as a uniqueness that is downright startling.
But that's it. The plot is kind of non existent and meandering. There really isn't much going on besides the search for a musical epiphany and a deeper meaning to...well...everything.
Kamikaze L'Amour is no longer in print and if you're a Kadrey fan, I'd pick it up if you find it. Just be prepared for a hallucinogenic type of experience.
In this book we follow a rock and roll musician,Ryder, who faked his death to get away from fame. Oh, and by the way, he can see sounds. He's on the search for a city of lights. Did I mention that the Amazon jungle has taken over San Francisco and Ryder's girlfriend is a rollerblading crazy lady?
This book has moments of poetic descriptions, a depth of feeling not readily found in most books as well as a uniqueness that is downright startling.
But that's it. The plot is kind of non existent and meandering. There really isn't much going on besides the search for a musical epiphany and a deeper meaning to...well...everything.
Kamikaze L'Amour is no longer in print and if you're a Kadrey fan, I'd pick it up if you find it. Just be prepared for a hallucinogenic type of experience.
June 11, 2012
There are some sluggish-repetitive metaphors--particularly in Kadrey's description of the environment--in "Kamikaze L' Amour" but the premise is so intriguing and the execution of the story is so brilliant that even those moments are forgivable. Kadrey addresses one of the great philosophical questions--"What if America had been settled by another culture?"--with a deftly poetic tale that's intriguing and sexy in the right way. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of fractals, light, movement, and sound via the narrator's synesthesia and love of music, even as I simultaneously entertained a dislike of the everyman self-indulgent narrator and his paper-tiger, euro-centered dilemmas. The narrator's ennui, insufferable self-interest, and egoism (perhaps drawn too close to the bone to our petty fixations) are made all the more grating by the real-world dilemmas overtaking the narration, literally and figuratively. It's extremely smart writing: concise dialogue and a beautifully rendered backdrop that makes one think and then think some more---worth every minute.
June 8, 2012
Not bad, actually. I read some of his more recent stuff first (notably the Sandman Slim novels) and this was a bit different. A little less heavy on the misanthrope revenge fantasy (which both made the Sandman Slim novels such a fun read but was also probably their greatest liability) and a little more on the bizarre, hazy, heavily drug-tinged unreality of an alternate future where most of California has become a literal urban jungle. Yeah, with the motherfucking jaguars and trees and all that.
As a self-proclaimed electronic musician working with... limited equipment, I was surprised to find out that that sort of thing is actually one of the central plot points of this book. Kind of funny reading about optical disks OF THE FUTRUE, though.
All in all an entertaining but I would say quite different take on the near-future. I guess some people might call this cyberpunk or something, but I'm not sure that's quite appropriate for this book. It's somehow cyberpunk without being particularly cyber and only slightly punk. I appreciated it's uniqueness.
As a self-proclaimed electronic musician working with... limited equipment, I was surprised to find out that that sort of thing is actually one of the central plot points of this book. Kind of funny reading about optical disks OF THE FUTRUE, though.
All in all an entertaining but I would say quite different take on the near-future. I guess some people might call this cyberpunk or something, but I'm not sure that's quite appropriate for this book. It's somehow cyberpunk without being particularly cyber and only slightly punk. I appreciated it's uniqueness.
February 19, 2018
1,2 skip a few 99,100
I drowned in the melancholic synaesthesia and found myself dissociating as much as the protagonist.
The descriptions are lush and vivid but I had no desire to read the full details of the character’s inner or outer journey so I scooted to the end for as much of a finish as was provided.
I drowned in the melancholic synaesthesia and found myself dissociating as much as the protagonist.
The descriptions are lush and vivid but I had no desire to read the full details of the character’s inner or outer journey so I scooted to the end for as much of a finish as was provided.
September 3, 2023
It had an interesting concept, and ocasional instances of compelling figurative language, but was marred by the poor plotting, pacing, writing style and racist characterizations. I wouldn't be surprised to learn if Kadrey was on most of the substances his characters used while writing this.
July 31, 2025
It's absolutely brilliant.
September 29, 2007
This is a well-written post-biopocalypse rock and roll novel. I gave it such a middlin' rating mostly because it skimps on plot for a froth of (admittedly awesome) psychadelic quantum physics ambient music sensawunda.
Kamikaze L'Amour concerns the adventures of a burned-out synaesthetic rock and roll megastar following his post suicide attempt breakout from an Oregon celebrity rehab center. He finds his way down the West coast to San Francisco. Somehow (ecoterrorist? Bioengineering gone bad? Magico-musical summoning?) the Amazon has grown all the way up into Marin County. All of California is a mess. Yage-snorting South American tribes have followed game all the way north, aggregating with the indigenous homeless to battle the scraps of US forces struggling weakly to maintain a toehold in all of the chaos.
Our nameless hero stumbles through an almost completely collapsed San Francisco in a haze of vodka and pills. Along the way, he meets a hot rollerblading waitress whose real gig is recording the ambient sounds of the invasive rainforest and reworking them into a sort of psychomusical gestalt, a sort of techoshamanic musique concret. The protagonist begins to feel as though his own path lies in this direction, somehow attaining the spiritual city of light of his sensory bleed by uncovering the music of the city.
His old life will not let him go so easy. In a too-quickly settled plot development, his former manager conspires with a SOMA hustler with dreams of rock stardom to entice him south to LA and back to the rock star grind. This part of the novel is pretty much blah blah blah, skip to the next cool image. And the cool images do abound. One just feels as though he could have strung them together with a bit more characterization. By the end of the novel, when the rock star has cobbled together a working studio in the Capitol Records building, and is well underway on his great work, we're given to believe that he has reached some kind of artistic epiphany, that his music will be the city and the former rollerblading waitress' will be the jungle (a rather essentialist establishment of duality, if you ask me). When their works reach their peak, a sort of high sample-rate alchemical wedding will come about and harmony will return to the world or some shit. Which is great, I'm a sucker for that sort of thing, but there's really no build up to this point.
All that being said, Kamikaze L'Amour is a fun read, and has some great ideas. At points, it is beautifully written. But what's frustrating is that these come couched in such a thin, quick-and-dirty package.
Oh yeah,I didn't mention the whole fractal chaos math mumbo jumbo aspect, did I? Well, it was published in 1995, and what's a drugged-out mid 90s urban shamanic initiation tale without some Mandelbrot series nonsense thrown around?
I guess that part of my ambivalence with this work lies in that damned pseudocool posturing that was so rife in the genre in this period. Even when a character is a sad sack of psychotic shit, you know that they look elegantly rumpled as they scrape matted vomit off of their distressed Armani lapels. That's part of the baggage of the genre, I suppose. Even the best of its authors have some heroic ideal self that they project onto their characters. I sure it's not limited to the genre either.
Kamikaze L'Amour concerns the adventures of a burned-out synaesthetic rock and roll megastar following his post suicide attempt breakout from an Oregon celebrity rehab center. He finds his way down the West coast to San Francisco. Somehow (ecoterrorist? Bioengineering gone bad? Magico-musical summoning?) the Amazon has grown all the way up into Marin County. All of California is a mess. Yage-snorting South American tribes have followed game all the way north, aggregating with the indigenous homeless to battle the scraps of US forces struggling weakly to maintain a toehold in all of the chaos.
Our nameless hero stumbles through an almost completely collapsed San Francisco in a haze of vodka and pills. Along the way, he meets a hot rollerblading waitress whose real gig is recording the ambient sounds of the invasive rainforest and reworking them into a sort of psychomusical gestalt, a sort of techoshamanic musique concret. The protagonist begins to feel as though his own path lies in this direction, somehow attaining the spiritual city of light of his sensory bleed by uncovering the music of the city.
His old life will not let him go so easy. In a too-quickly settled plot development, his former manager conspires with a SOMA hustler with dreams of rock stardom to entice him south to LA and back to the rock star grind. This part of the novel is pretty much blah blah blah, skip to the next cool image. And the cool images do abound. One just feels as though he could have strung them together with a bit more characterization. By the end of the novel, when the rock star has cobbled together a working studio in the Capitol Records building, and is well underway on his great work, we're given to believe that he has reached some kind of artistic epiphany, that his music will be the city and the former rollerblading waitress' will be the jungle (a rather essentialist establishment of duality, if you ask me). When their works reach their peak, a sort of high sample-rate alchemical wedding will come about and harmony will return to the world or some shit. Which is great, I'm a sucker for that sort of thing, but there's really no build up to this point.
All that being said, Kamikaze L'Amour is a fun read, and has some great ideas. At points, it is beautifully written. But what's frustrating is that these come couched in such a thin, quick-and-dirty package.
Oh yeah,I didn't mention the whole fractal chaos math mumbo jumbo aspect, did I? Well, it was published in 1995, and what's a drugged-out mid 90s urban shamanic initiation tale without some Mandelbrot series nonsense thrown around?
I guess that part of my ambivalence with this work lies in that damned pseudocool posturing that was so rife in the genre in this period. Even when a character is a sad sack of psychotic shit, you know that they look elegantly rumpled as they scrape matted vomit off of their distressed Armani lapels. That's part of the baggage of the genre, I suppose. Even the best of its authors have some heroic ideal self that they project onto their characters. I sure it's not limited to the genre either.
July 11, 2015
An early book from Kadrey, this one's heavily Ballard-inspired. Whether due to purposeful action or accidental science gone awry, the Amazonian jungle has made its way north with lightning speed, and California is fighting a losing battle. Starting in San Francisco, we meet a rock star who's tried to kill himself, called it quits, and walked out of an asylum to try to find a new life. It's not so easy, as everyone else still wants a piece of him. As the jungle takes over the city, he meets a cast of odd characters, and the Ballardian aspects of the book grow stronger. Our hero's synesthesia lends a nicely psychotropic feel, as he tries to find the sound of the city that "looks" just right to him. He winds up fleeing south to LA in search of a woman he met in SF, and the journey, thanks to his feverish, drug-addled haze, is nicely trippy, concluding in a fully overgrown Hollywood populated by Amazonian refugees and an array of jungle wildlife. There are hints here of the LA that Kadrey has brought to life in his Sandman Slim series, but awash in a post-jungle-apocalypse malaise. This is a slow-moving book, dreamlike, and won't appeal to everyone, but scenes and ideas will stick with you. And for those of us who appreciate the rock and music side of things can find additional fun bits and pieces to chew on.
November 13, 2015
I've read this about 2/3 of the way through and think I'm ready to stop. A few comments. Firstly, it shows some talent on Kadrey's part, despite my 2-star rating. There is some ingenuity in the way he describes things. There is some vivid imagery and successfully poetic language in many instances. It's certainly an experimental novel in the sense that it takes on synesthesia outright, leading to nonsensical statements which are nonetheless sensible to the main character. As others will point out, the plot of the book is slow. Not much happens; main character gets out of psych ward; meets dealer; meets girl; gets a tryst going; explores some of his music ... I suppose I have nothing against absence of plot, but the story did not effectively pull me into it. It felt way too heavily descriptive; lingering descriptions of the city, of the jungle, of the character's mindset, with an absence of exterior motion, event, and development. Some of the plot turns seemed fairly inexplicable to me; I did not understand why Frida decided to go south to LA. The overall writing also seemed uneven at times, with certain sentences appearing to be off-rhythm or unnecessarily obtuse.
All in all, a decent effort, but too rough around the edges for me.
All in all, a decent effort, but too rough around the edges for me.
August 12, 2016
Okay, I have to make a confession. This book was...uh...yeah. It follows the tale of a rock'n roll musician who decides to "kill himself" before the start of the 21st Century, and his journey through a strange new world. I must confess I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON AND WHY. It could be I'm not used to that style of writing; or didn't give it a proper chance--I don't know. All I *do* know is if everyone else "gets it" can they explain it to me? Thanks in advance...
June 11, 2011
I... I really don't know what I thought of this.
I thought it suffered a bit of Magical Native - I didn't think it was a really terrible case of it, but YMMV. I liked that . I really liked the depiction of synesthesia.
Other than that, it just left me feeling kind of blank.
I thought it suffered a bit of Magical Native - I didn't think it was a really terrible case of it, but YMMV. I liked that . I really liked the depiction of synesthesia.
Other than that, it just left me feeling kind of blank.
June 13, 2011
A passable update on Ballard's Crystal World with a Jon Hassell soundtrack, but it ends up cursory, little more than a novella, and ultimately unsatisfying when compared to Kadrey's fabulous catalogue.
January 14, 2010
I think I just started this book at the wrong time. I just wasn't in the mood for that kind of story. I normally really like Richard Kadrey, but this one didn't do it for me. I think I'll give it another try when I'm in the right mind set. Provided any of that made sense!
February 18, 2013
I love this book. I read it when I was living in San Francisco, across the hill from twin peaks. Needless to say this book put all kinds of fanciful notions into my head especially around dusk. I could see so many images from the book on my scooter ride home from the muni station.
October 25, 2015
Read it back in 2002 and liked it for its sur-real imagery and melancholic atmosphere. For a detailed review, please visit my blog: http://tesatorul.blogspot.ro/2007/12/...
April 15, 2025
Re-reading in 2025, I wonder about whether this could be made into a film with some changes.
It definitely hits some notes well.
Some of it is very in the head of the protagonist, but possibly we have the special effects for that now.
It definitely hits some notes well.
Some of it is very in the head of the protagonist, but possibly we have the special effects for that now.
September 16, 2012
An earlier work of a terrific author, and it does have that feel to it. Interesting idea, some awesome imagery, but the plot never quite comes together.
August 6, 2014
Loud. Bizarre! Truly entertaining.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews