Customer Reviews

Kiss Me, Judas

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

"Kiss Me, Judas" is summed up nicely by the author himself when he calls it a "scary love story." Many other authors would have used the basic premise of the storyline - the harvesting of one's kidney while the donor is alive and unwilling - to delve into the underbelly of today's black market, but Chris Baer uses it as a dark and gritty backdrop to the core theme he wants us to recognize, and that is of modern-day love and loss.

Baer writes the way everyone aspires to - brutally honest and open. When everyone else has the secrets of their hearts sealed in a box and guarded with sentries, Chris has his unlocked and painted on every page as if writing in his own journal. The things that we lack the courage to even whisper to ourselves are exposed and illuminated for all the world to see and reading it puts Baer's very soul in the limelight.

Each turn of the page slashes another razorblade across his wrist and we ache with every darkly heartfelt comment that Phineas makes. The aching of the protagonist is compelling and the constant questioning of what is real or imagined, true love or false hope, guilt or innocence, puts a ray of light into our own minds, into the questions that we subconsciously ask ourselves but we don't have the fortitude to actually ponder honestly.

Baer shows us how love can bring you to the brink of self-destruction, and how it can also pull you out of the depths. These pages are bruising to the soul, but ultimately cathartic. This is a novel that we need to read, because love is the only feeling that can make anyone fall, but it can keep us from falling, too.

So we have one lady complaining that Baer doesn't use quotation marks and it made it difficult to read and one man complaining about the names of things. I'm going to try and write a better review than either of those.

This story is the first in a trilogy [with Penny Dreadful and Hell's Half Acre rounding out the three] where the protagonist Phineas Poe has his kidney stolen by Jude after he is released from a mental institute after a nervous breakdown in Internal Affairs. What follows is the muddled trek of one man in a drugged stupor that's just trying to get his kidney back and the girl.

Baer's strength resides in his awesome ability to describe things. For instance when Phineas tries to remember what Jude he says, "Red dress, black hair, body like a knife..." showing that she has a sleek, strong, and dangerous body. He also keeps things short to mimick Phineas's own short thought patterns. He thinks like he's drugged and just wants to see beyond that and that's how you read it. He tries to kill people, but can't and you know he has a heart somewhere in his frail body. Even Jude can't help herself.

Despite all of the violence and drugs surrounding him, Phineas makes ends of things and finds a way to make things work and that's what matters in the end. He comes to terms with his fragmented thoughts, his wife's death, Jude's theft, and all the other people involved.

As for the title being Kiss Me, Judas it works, because in the end that's all Phineas wants.

I had no idea what to expect when I picked this up. Wow was I surprised. This story is completely original. Phineas is a very strange character. I found myself wondering if this all was a brief hallusination, or if these things were in fact occuring. I would love to see them weave this story into a movie. This book is not for all. I loved to be grossed out, and read things just for pure shock value. Any book where the protagionst awakens with a missing kidney-is a book I love to read. I would reccomend this to anyone who enjoys anything out of the norm.

Its not a backward moving story but it is about a dark journey by a man in search of something he has lost. This time, its his kidney. The femme fatale this time around is a cute asian woman with a military background who gets off on harvesting black market organs. She picks on our hero, Phineas Poe, and so begins a fantastically dark and deep story.

There are two stories here: the story of the kidney (who has it, who wants it, whose the fat guy with the gloves?) and the unfolding back-story of Phineas Poe's tragic past.

Not to everyone's palate, but if you dig dark and moody, you'll dig this!

So it's noir written in the late 90s. So it's written like a dream (a nightmare, actually), no quotations marks, paragraphs that attempt no meaning, etc. So it's Baer; who the hell is he?!?!?! One of the most promising authors today, that's for sure. I'm from Argentina, so you can imagine than when I bought this book in Italy (I bought the English version), I didn't know who this guy was or anything. Let me tell you this is not an easy read, but it is an AMAZING journey to the depths of a psychotic mind (Phineas, that is). I found the non quotation marks added to the "I'm not going to make things easier for the reader" possition Baer took. I'm very delighted with the novel, which is not only an hypnotic tale but a love story at it's best (so you can imagine it's full of peverse, cynical thoughts and actions). READ IT.

Phineas Poe, an alcoholic, drug addict, and former investigator for the Internal Affairs Division of the Denver Police Department, was just released from a state psych ward where he landed when his wife, Lucy, was killed in a boating accident last spring. Or, she may have committed suicide. She was slowly dying from leukemia and had been depressed. Then again, Phineas may have shot her, an act he occasionally hallucinates. The reader never actually learns the facts behind Lucy's death. They're not what's important here.

This surreal, very edgy noir novel opens around Christmastime, with Poe drinking vodka at a hotel bar. A stunning woman in red sits down beside him. Her name is Jude. "She has a scar at the edge of her mouth and disturbing eyes. Her body is like a knife." It has been too long since he sat so close to a woman. The two go up to his room. She is $200. richer before they open the door. When he awakens, he does so in a tub filled with melting ice and watery blood, minus a kidney. The lovely lady has absconded with the vital organ and left our hero oozing, but neatly sutured...er stapled. She also left a note for Poe - "If you want to live, call 911."

Events only become more bizarre as the tale continues. Poe leaves the hospital way too soon, nauseous, weak, still bleeding and barely able to walk. He has to find Jude. She has stolen his heart along with the kidney. Definitely smitten, Phineas wants one more tete-a-tete with this scalpel wielding woman. He wants her body, along with some champagne, before he finally kills her. Their reunion is his ultimate goal, although he is so high and hallucinatory most of the time, that occasionally the two are together and Poe is unaware of it. Phineas would like to recover his kidney too, and see if it is possible to reinsert it. He calls his friend Crumb, proprietor of a local sex shop, "The Witch's Teat," who practices medicine on the side. Crumb takes care of gunshot wounds and even dental work, for the poor and the desperate. He is not a doctor, or even a past med student, but he does have a closet filled with old medical texts. He is certainly able to dispense friendly advice, check on Poe's wound...and even better, give him morphine for the pain. Somewhere around this point, Poe discovers he may, or may not, have a bag of heroin stuffed inside him where his left kidney used to live. The heroin is payment for the organ Jude stole and was supposed to have delivered. Did she deliver?

Poe and Jude hook up, finally, and go on an implausible mission together with an objective I am not totally sure of - but it doesn't matter. It's the getting there that's important -the things that happen along the way. Look at the "Wizard of Oz!" From Denver to Las Vegas to El Paso, the two meet a succession of sinister, twisted men and women who usually wind up dead: Crumb, Eve and Georgia, Rose White, Moon, Blister, Pooh, Luscious Gore, etc.. One needs to suspend disbelief to get into this paranoid nightmarish scenario. And when one does, it all fits into place nicely. I had a blast reading this rather compelling novel and intend to read Will Christopher Baer's other two Phineas Poe books, "Penny Dreadful" and "Hell's Half Acre."

Baer's first-person narrative, sometimes dreamy, sometimes incoherent, always strong, is perfect here once the reader is able to loosen up and go with the flow. What does that mean, actually? Well, reading "Kiss Me Judas" is like having a fascinating conversation with an intelligent person who is often out of his head. Jude pumps Phineas full of liquid Valium and morphine, for pain and to control him, so his mind does wander far and wide, and he is the one telling the story - with great flair and occasional confusion. Once you get the rhythm and understand the tangents, it works. Trust me! This quirky novel is well worth the read. And I loved the conclusion - it suits!
JANA

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 happen to randomly pick this book up, and disover that it's remotely close to a screenplay I just optioned. Well, that happens...seems it won't be too long when a plethora of urban myth kidney hijacking tales will be cluttering the marketplace.

For a genre novel, I was surprised Baer's publsher (the intrepid Viking Penguin) let him get away without putting quatation marks around dialogue. I've had publishers place these marks there when it was never my intention, on the manuscript. "Oh, but the general genre reader will get confused..."

Seems some publishers feel the lack of quotes around dialogue is for esoteric literary authors only.

I was immediately sucked into this book. Scary stuff. Haunting images. I think from pages 100-150 it was all padding. "I need this novel to be 80,000 words or it won't sell!" I see Baer saying (as I have seen myself saying).

Baer couldn've cut a good 15-20,000 words off this book and streamlined it. I almost didn't finish it. Then I got hooked again.

The ending left me cold and empty...which is a good thing, for a book like this.

The memories of his dying wife, her suicide (or murder) struck a home chord.

I will definitely look for this guy's next book.

This is an interesting book that held my attention pretty easily through a dark story of prostitues, heroin, and black-market human organ purchases. Phineas Poe is the protagonist; and he is never quite in his right mind. He has flashbacks to events surrounding his wife's death and the assault of a teenage friend (Eve), but we later learn some or maybe all of those flashbacks aren't real.

We know from the outset that Phineas has some psychosis, since the book starts out by telling us that he was just released from a psych ward. He even tells us that due to intolerable side effects, he won't be taking the meds that would keep his mind from taking flight.

I'm not quite sure what the ending was about, and I considered this a weak point--even realizing that in this weird tale, it's not where the story is going but the trip our characters are on. This has a strong existential undertone to it, and some readers will welcome the disengaged manner in which Phineas treats his life--from essentially ignoring a serious surgical wound to having unprotected intercourse and trusting his life to a very dangerous prostitute who may or may not love him.

It was an interesting story, but I don't feel really inclined to pursue more books of this sort.

I can't really find the words to describe this book, something that has never happened to me before. This book takes you into a dark underworld that you can't possibly imagine. It challenges what you have already been told and dares you to think or question anything. I would definatly recommend this to anyone who wants to be dragged into a strange world of sex, drugs and love.