With his new novel, The Grand Dark (Harper Voyager), Richard Kadrey takes an artistic leap from his renowned Sandman Slim supernatural noir books. We sit down in a murder hotel to talk about mixing robots and genetic engineering with Weimar Germany, getting inspired by Mel Gordon's Voluptuous Panic, David Bowie's Low, and the Brothers Quay's Street of Crocodiles, the impact of the 2016 election on his writing, and how he's getting ready to end the Sandman Slim series. We also get into the gentrification of the east Village and the Bowery, the thin line between preservation and nostalgia, the moment his brain got warped by Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, our shared love of What We Do In The Shadows, the time he attended a screening of Cronenberg's Crash with Kathy Acker, his LitReactor course on writing dark urban fantasy, the wonder of being edited by Ellen Datlow, the accretionary model of novel-writing, and why it's okay to build your fantastic world by just looking out the window. (Check out our 2018 conversation!) • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal