Kiss Me Judas edition by Will Christopher Baer Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : Kiss Me Judas edition by Will Christopher Baer Literature Fiction eBooks 
Have you ever loved someone who’s mortally wounded you? Phineas Poe, disgraced cop and morphine addict, has just been released from a psych ward when he meets a beautiful woman named Jude in a hotel bar. Red dress, black hair, body like a knife. He takes her back to his room and wakes up the next morning in a bathtub full of blood and ice, missing a kidney. Falling for her is the start of a twisted love story that takes him from the snowy streets of Denver to the high plains of Texas, where the boundaries between torturer and victim, killer and accomplice, become nightmarishly distorted.
About
Born in Mississippi in 1966. Old Southern family. Lived in Montreal and Italy as a child. Spent high school years in Memphis, Tennessee. Attended college in New Orleans, Louisiana (Tulane). Dropped out. Finished B.A. at Memphis State. Received MFA 1995 from Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. California since 1996, Bay Area, L.A., now Santa Barbara. Worked as homeless counselor, taxi driver, bartender, video store geek, college professor (Evergreen State, Olympia, Washington), screenwriter, and journalist. Short stories published in numerous places, notably Nerve and Bomb. Married, one child by previous marriage. One brother. Parents still living in
North Carolina.
Kiss Me Judas edition by Will Christopher Baer Literature Fiction eBooks
“Love is a reptile, I say. Don’t you think? If you cut off its tail it grows another one.”KISS ME, JUDAS is the unflinchingly noir. The protagonist, Phineas Poe, is a man on a downward spiral. His every decision drags his life further toward the drain. There’s no shortage of femme fatal characters Including wife Lucy, the mysterious Isabel, straight-out-of-a-fairytale Rose White, edgy Eve, and Jude, the woman who discovers Phineas is her exact type.
Phineas is the ultimate unreliable narrator, making the story a cypher to solve. He’s unpredictable and self-destructive, but never, ever boring. I look forward to locking myself in tight and experiencing his next roller coaster of an adventure. I’m curious to see how he manages to survive through an entire trilogy.
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Kiss Me Judas edition by Will Christopher Baer Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
Kiss Me, Judas. A story about a man whose kidney is stolen by a prostitute. Can that urban legend be anything but the stale center of an overtired premise? Apparantly, it CAN be something more.
Will Christopher Baer's writing is edgy, visceral, and almost nauseating in its effectiveness. Nauseating in the same way that leaping off a cliff can be nauseating. Phineas Poe, the central character of the novel, starts the novel kidney-less and on the verge of death, and for the rest of the story he eats very little, sleeps only when he is knocked out, and takes a whole boquet of random and usually nameless drugs that leave him teetering on the knife-edge between antsy bliss and crippling withdrawl. Baer's prose more than once left me feeling deep sympathy pains for the protagonist, and everytime I closed the book, I felt distinctly disoriented. It would be difficult to find someone not drawn head-first into this well-crafted world of present tense paranoias and pains.
There is not much to be found in the way of relief, however, and even the conclusion of the novel -- a powerful, poignant, and almost penultimate moment of touching sweetness and deep spiritual candor -- seems to end before it can really provide the kind of blessed closure the book seems to ache for.
Because, Phineas is not just suffering in a body that has been cut and battered and poisoned, but he is also aching under the strain of a heavy and shattered heart that thinks it may, once again, be in love -- this time with the woman who cut out his kidney.
As implausible as that seems in a summary, the book manages to navigate with well-honed instincts around the more treacherous areas of that premise into a deep, calm bay of believability. I wouldn't love the woman (Jude is her name, a somewhat overt Biblical reference with more symbolism attached than it first suggests), but I can certainly see with unquestionable clarity why Poe loves her, and as a result, I don't doubt much of what he does or why he does it, even if I shake my head when I read about it.
However, the book certainly gives you a lot to doubt. The story is plagued by liars and deceivers, and the final resting place of Poe's kidney is never clarified. Most of the elements of the tale are given some kind of resolution, but Baer teasingly suggests that every one of those resolutions could very well be false. In the end -- and this is a definite certainty -- very very very little about the novel's events can be understood with any certainty. Who is lying? Who isn't? What are anybody's true motives and goals? Baer seems to suggest some plausible explanations for all of these things, but in the same moment, with a wink and a dark smirk, he also lets you know that those explanations aren't necessarily valid.
Or important.
Because, in the end, whether or not any of the characters has told the truth, whether or not Jude really shares Poe's love or is simply using him, well, these things are all beside the point, because what the novel is about is Poe's shattered soul, and what it takes to repair it, to redeem it, to save it outside of the dark, twisted realm of lies and pain in which it is so deeply immersed.
In fact, the only reason I didn't give this novel five stars was because, ultimately, its more philosophical and spiritual and emotional points seem at odds with its dark Gothic dressing and its unrelenting ocean of anguish and confusion. Baer, it seems, has two different tales here, and although he has married them well, they still don't go together seamlessly. There are fits and starts to the emotional arc.
And while it is obvious that Baer is suggesting that not all of the questions need solid answers, he still sets you up to expect them, and their absence leaves a sort of aching void. But perhaps that's the point. The book is one big aching void, and its lack of sympathy for both its central character and the reader seems to belie a deeper intent one that is, at its heart, purely speculative, purely emotional, purely mental. It's a bumpy ride with a sudden stop, but the landscape -- both external and internal -- is breath-taking, and not always in a pleasant and relaxing way. Like Poe, you have to search sometimes to reclaim the breath that was stolen from you.
And in the meantime, you're aching for air.
I like reading. Plenty. But there have only been a handful of books that left me seriously anxious to return to them, to get back into the story, the prose, and find out where it's all going. But, mostly, it's just about being there in it. This is one of those books for me. Others are GLAMORAMA by Bret Easton Ellis and MARABOU STORK NIGHTMARES by Irvine Welsh. I also remember, from a long long time ago, CD Payne's YOUTH IN REVOLT being like that.
Anyway, what usually really gets me is mood, energy, and language. I don't often choose books because of plot, but this one has that, as well as those other three things. I also really like to be surprised. This "neo-noir" novel is definitely from a writer that's wholly his own, marching to the beat of his own drummer and all that. It goes through a dark labyrinth of twists and turns and sensations and sicknesses. And I was left surprised by the character's choices, thought processes, and the way things unfolded.
It's moody as s*** but also beautiful on top of it. I often associate "noir" with prose that has few similes and metaphors and is mostly uninterested in poetic language. This is noir that is ripe with similes, metaphors, and poetic language. While definitely his own writer with his own language, style, and themes, I would say it seems clear that JESUS' SON was probably an influence on Baer, as well as Cormac McCarthy. His prose is thoughtful and ponderous and sometimes philosophical/religious, yet full of violence and mistrust and ugliness. What's always surprised me about McCarthy and now this book, is that you have all that visceral, savage brutality in there, but it never feels like anger or outrage. There's a calm beauty to it all, still. That's not easy to do. I'm not sure how it's done, really.
Also, a lot of reviewers seemed to feel like this book lost track or got confusing or something halfway through, and I'd have to disagree with that. After getting halfway, then two-thirds-way thru, I kept waiting for this book to get sloppy or whatever, and that never happened. I'm guessing the unreliable narrator of this story might confuse things if you're not used to the idea of an unreliable narrator, but everything Baer does here with his unreliable narrator is damn near flawless and makes "sense" in the end. Actually, there were a few times that I felt like he even spelled it out for the reader, and I wasn't sure that was necessary, but it worked all the same.
LOVED this book. I read the version and have ordered a hardback copy as I like to own the paper versions of any book I expect to reread, and this is one of them. I hope that fourth book of his that's been delayed for 9 years ago comes out soon as I bet I'll tear thru his only other two books pretty quickly.
Easily one of the best books i have ever read. Unreliable narrator, non traditional mystery, a perplexing pair of characters, and sunplots that are entirely cleared up. There is enough ambiguity in here to keep me wondering.
The best description is by the author himself, a scary love story. Some of the best scenes were between the two main characters. My favorite was on the train where Poe took a knife jude. The scene was full of tension, sexual and otherwise. This is also the scene that reveals an important theme of the novel, trust.
At times the prose was a bit stale. While there were a few memorable lines here and there, it mostly stuck with declarations and lacked subtly or subtext.
Would recomend to anyone who enjoys neo-noir flavored with a deeper meaning.
“Love is a reptile, I say. Don’t you think? If you cut off its tail it grows another one.”
KISS ME, JUDAS is the unflinchingly noir. The protagonist, Phineas Poe, is a man on a downward spiral. His every decision drags his life further toward the drain. There’s no shortage of femme fatal characters Including wife Lucy, the mysterious Isabel, straight-out-of-a-fairytale Rose White, edgy Eve, and Jude, the woman who discovers Phineas is her exact type.
Phineas is the ultimate unreliable narrator, making the story a cypher to solve. He’s unpredictable and self-destructive, but never, ever boring. I look forward to locking myself in tight and experiencing his next roller coaster of an adventure. I’m curious to see how he manages to survive through an entire trilogy.
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