"The book is titled Blind Shrike. It's not a rotten book, I think. In fact, it's a pretty traditional fantasy quest, just one that, to me, makes sense in George W. Bush's America. The hero of the story is on a quest for his own lost ignorance and innocence. He really doesn't want to know too much because, as many of us have learned, too much information is a soul-sucking pain in the ass. In the book you'll also find magic and monsters, angels and demons, magical swords and forbidden books. And blimps. Every fantasy novel should have at least one blimp." -- Richard Kadrey

Mac Tonnies' Cyberpunk/Postmodern Book Reviews calls Metrophage "one of the quintessential 1980s cyberpunk novels," going on to describe "a gritty acid-trip through an ultraviolent L.A. where nothing is what it seems.... Alongside novels such as [William Gibson's] Neuromancer and Lewis Shiner's debut novel Frontera, Metrophage helped establish the cyberpunk aesthetic: relentless, paranoid and playfully cynical."

This story is excerpted from Kadrey's second novel Kamikaze L'Amour. The novel is described by Mac Tonnies' Cyberpunk/Postmodern Book Reviews as "mesmerizing...a surreal (and distinctly Ballardian) account of synesthesia and mutant desire set in the jungle-choked ruins of L.A."