Penny Dreadful [Paperback]

Fans of Will Christopher Baer's first novel, Kiss Me, Judas, have already met Phineas Poe: defrocked cop, former morphine addict, part-time psychotic, and a man who has lost his heart to a woman who left him in a tub full of ice, one kidney shy of the standard allotment. Poe knows a bad day when he sees one:

The thing is that my consciousness drifts and I have forgotten what I look like. I pass my reflection in a blackened window and I may not recognize myself. My reflection is perceived as a threat, an ugly twin. My reflection is a dark nonperson, a stranger on the street and this is not an identity crisis as I understand the phrase.

The bad days are back in Baer's second noir offering (and book two of his Poe trilogy), Penny Dreadful. Fresh from his surgical unpleasantness and eager to start a new life in Denver, Poe contacts a former colleague, Detective Moon, who shares with Poe the drunken admission that several handfuls of Denver's finest are missing. Among them is Moon's dearest friend, Detective Jimmy Sky.

When Poe agrees to look for Sky, things quantumly shift from bad to gross as he uncovers the gothish Game of Tongues, a freakishly cruel and narcotically fueled live action role-playing game (think Dungeons and Dragons in leather and chains), the object of which is to seek, suck, sever, and swallow the tongues of fellow players. Deaths ensue--imagine that!--and things spiral down from there.

Slim, existential, and darkly humorous, Penny Dreadful is a challenging (the point of view slides like Jackie Robinson, and if you prefer your dialogue with quotation marks you'd better bring your own) but beautiful train-wreck of a book that constantly dares the reader to look away. But if you don't look at the twisted metal, you'll never see the art. --Michael Hudson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

In Baer's dark sequel to his first novel, Kiss Me, Judas, there is no moral yardstick, none of traditional noir's submerged longing for redemption, only a violent, Dungeons and Dragons-ish s&m hell. Phineas Poe, enervated, depressed and missing a kidney after misadventures in Texas, is hired by his old Denver police buddy, Moon, to find officer Jimmy Sky, who has vanished. Because neither Poe nor the reader is told of Sky's importance until he is finally located, the tale hangs not on suspense but on sensationalist gore. Poe descends into a twisted world of sadomasochistic goths playing the dangerous "game of tongues," an elaborate predatory pursuit where biting off one's victim's tongue increases the power of the biter within the hierarchical system of players. Incited by the narcotic "Pale," the mostly college-age participants frolic perilously in stygian alleys, assuming fantastic alter egos that eventually threaten their real identities. One player, "Chrome," instead of performing the bloody French kiss that is the game's currency, kills his victims --and that becomes police business. Poe, initiated into the game, resists its seduction, discovers the double lives of his old colleagues and eventually saves his girlfriend. Baer's language is hip, spare, brutal, sometimes gorgeous. Although there are some touching (albeit twisted) relationships, readers will have a hard time identifying with the deranged, damaged characters, since Baer withholds the truth about their lives until the end of the story. But once the game's main trick is revealed, the narrative loses steam. The payoff, however, is the voyeuristic glimpse the novel affords into the imaginary labyrinth inhabited by obsessive, nihilistic gothic gamers. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Please deposit four quarters to read the following, about a novel that bears bits of colored glass and has sex coming from it in waves. A warning: Some will not grasp, and if they grasp will not like, Baers crazed world of death-chocolates and bloody strawberries, all done in a neon noir express influenced by the Siamese Bills, Burroughs, and Gibson. Baers superbly stylized debut novel, Kiss Me, Judas (1998), is Penny Dreadfuls prequel. That one opened with Internal Affairs Division detective Phineas Poe ratting on his own agency in Denver, recovering from a nervous breakdown after his wifes death, picking up Jude in a bar, being given a horse tranquillizer, then waking in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney missing, his side stapled closed and a phone nearby with the note Phone 911 to save your life. A wonderful opening, with unrelenting invention throughout. Theres no dimming of same here, either, although for sheer weirdness the storytelling rockets to even higher levels of glowing semiconsciousness. The missing-kidney ploy is replaced by The Game, in which Chrome, the boyfriend of the exquisite Goo (a.k.a. Eve), and assisted by Mingus the Breather (a.k.a. Matthew Roar), finds starved, bruised, and bombed- out Tremblers in alleys and bites out, chews, and swallows their tongues. Phineas has returned penniless from South America and Mexico and is put up by Eve/Goo. He calls his star-crossed buddy Detective Walter Moon for help, and Moon enlists him in finding homicide cop Jimmy Sky, who has faded from sight along with 13 other deep-cover narcs and vice cops. Thus at last Phineas is led to master villain Theseus the Glove. Demanding, violently lighted changes of brainscape keep you blinking. The baffled reader often feels like someone sitting at a red light with eyes shrunk to pinpricks and horns honking hysterically behind. Baers over-the-top magic, however, will attract and lock in new members to his cult. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Baer is without a doubt a writer if talent and promise. -- Denver Post, May 7, 2000 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

In this claustrophobic tale of urban despair and existential noir, ex-cop Phineas Poe-protagonist of Will Christopher Baer's first novel, Kiss Me, Judas-returns to Denver to find that reality has been rewritten and the laws of reason redrawn. When Phineas is asked by his old ally, Detective Moon, to find a missing officer named Jimmy Sky, he becomes an unwitting participant in a live role-playing game. Everyone he meets has multiple personalities, and Phineas himself soon loses track of his own various identities. Crossing the lines between traditional noir, fantasy, and edgy realism, Penny Dreadful shares sensibilities with everything from the books of William Gibson and Neal Gaiman to the films Trainspotting and The Matrix and the webgames Doom and Myst. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Will Christopher Baer was born in 1966 in Mississippi and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. He has won fiction prizes from Story Magazine and published work in Bomb and Nerve. He lives in California. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.