A confession: I’m not always a fan of collaborations. When they don’t work, you can feel the authors butting heads through the pages of the book, trying to stir their styles together but they mix like oil and water. What you end up with is less than the sum of their parts.

When they work, however—Good Omens and the collaborations of Stephen King and Peter Straub come immediately to mind—the result can be magical, a perfect meeting of the minds. When I heard that two authors I love, Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey, had written a novel together, I was optimistic. Khaw’s elegant but unsettling variety of cosmic horror and Kadrey’s grim, sardonic urban fantasy seemed like it could be a match made in heaven, or in this case hell.

I’m happy to report that The Dead Take the A Train is a rollicking good time, a non-stop, runaway train of a novel that you won’t be able to put down.

The Dead Take the A Train is set in New York City’s underground magical world, a place reminiscent of the Los Angeles Kadrey writes about in the Sandman Slim novels. Think high powered financial wizards who are actually wizards, Lovecraftian eldritch horrors, and a variety of entities who may or may not be gods. This is territory tailor-made for both Kadrey and Khaw and they seem to delight in attacking the page, leavening the mayhem with plenty of humor.

The cast of characters who populate the novel, whether kind and for the most part good-hearted or spectacularly not so, are complex and fully realized. The magic system that pervades this world, it should come as no surprise, is well-thought-out and fully integrated into the NYC we know. It feels natural. This is especially true of the two main characters, Julie and Sarah. Khaw and Kadrey put them through the wringer, and you’ll find yourself rooting for them, especially when things seem darkest. Did I mention there’s a tender, tentative love story that weaves its way through the entire story?

Amazon tells me that The Dead Take the A Train is book one in the Carrion City Duology, and I could not be happier. I can’t wait to return to this world.