Richard Kadrey

Metrophage, published in 1988, placed Richard Kadrey among the cyberpunk writers of that decade, though the wider readership arrived in 2009 with Sandman Slim, whose narrator James Stark claws his way back out of Hell into a Los Angeles that has moved on without him. Born in New York City on 27 August 1957, Kadrey worked for years as a journalist and photographer, writing about art, technology and culture for Wired and Omni, editing The Covert Culture Sourcebook and The Catalog of Tomorrow, and co-founding the Dead Media Project with Bruce Sterling. The Stark novels ran until 2021, closing with King Bullet. The Grand Dark had come in 2019, and The Dead Take the A Train, written with Cassandra Khaw, in 2023. His short fiction appears in anthologies including Nightmares, the survey of recent horror that Ellen Datlow assembled for Tachyon Publications in 2016, where Kadrey's entry is the story Ambitious Boys Like You. He lives in Pittsburgh.