We start off with our hero escaping from hell. He wakes up on a pile of burning trash in LA. He talks about the hard times he had Downtown, as he likes to call Hell. Turns out his is a Magician, part of a group of supernatrals living among the humans. There are a lot of Angels and Demons and other things that are not quit the normal creepy crawlers of horror stories, but are pretty close.
One thing leads to another and he pretty quickly meets an old friend and cuts off his head. He’s good at this kind of stuff and the guy he decapitates doesn’t die. He keeps the head in a closet so he can talk to it when he wants to.
Turns out a group of old buddies sold him to hell, where he’s been fighting for the past 11 years. He came back because his girlfriend was killed by the guy the sent him to hell.
There is a lot of fun stuff going on here. Lots of silly stuff and lots of fun stuff. But there’s also a lot of darker stuff. People are killed in random fashion. There is a lot of carnage of one sort or another. Lots of wanton destruction.
The story unfolds in first person and present tense, which means we have to be in the company of our uber macho hero at all times. He likes guns and knives and killing things. It could be worse.
I liked Sandman Slim, but there’s a lot of familiar stuff here. It’s kind of like the Dresden Files, Hellboy, Spawn, and countess other supernatural stories of the past few years. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The random murders of innocent bystanders kind of bugged me. Still, it’s full of angels and demons, so I guess a few random deaths are to be expected.
