Kiss Me, Judas

by Will Christopher Baer

Overview

“Don’t worry,” a voice whispers. “You really only need one.”
 
Phineas Poe, disgraced cop turned psychiatric case, turned murder suspect, turned reluctant kidney donor, gives $200 to a beautiful woman in a red dress, a scar at the edge of her mouth and a body like a knife. He then wakes up in a bath of melting ice, blood on his fingers and staples in his sides. Now she haunts his dreams and his days. She’s got his kidney on ice and her teeth in his heart.
 
Finding her means throwing himself into a drug-blurred underworld. Falling in love with her means fighting to avoid becoming her accomplice as well as her victim.
 
Fast, corrosive wit, glittering, razor-sharp images, a cast of comic and sinister characters, part love story, part mystery, part hallucination, Kiss Me, Judas is a startling novel of modern noir.
 
“A surreal nightmare full of the hard-boiled nourish spirit of Raymond Chandler.” – San Francisco Chronicle

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140289015
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/2000
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	757,115
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

Will Christopher Baer was born in 1966 in Mississippi and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. He has won fiction prizes from Story Magazine and has published work in Bomb and Nerve. He lives in California.

What People are Saying About This

Madison Smartt Bell

"Kiss Me Judas is ingeniously plotted, a perfect noir novel, right up there with Chandler's The Big Sleep." -- Author of All Souls' Rising

Poppy Z. Brite

"A deconstruction of an urban legend, a dark unraveling of mystery within mystery Kiss Me, Judas is a fine and dangerous work." -- Author of Exquisite Corpose

Editorial Reviews

Dark, foreboding, claustrophobic and dreamy are words that accurately describe this noir. The setup is simple, if a bit over the top (as is much of the book, a possible problem if you don't give yourself over to it): Phineas Poe, an ex-cop fresh out of a mental hospital­where he retreated after the suicide (or was it murder?) of his cancer-ridden wife­meets a woman at a hotel bar, they seem to connect and she goes up to his room with him. He awakens a day or so later in a bathtub full of melting ice, a note wadded in his hand that reads, "If you want to live, call 911." She has, it seems, taken his kidney.
>From there everything gets only weirder. He walks out of the hospital a little too soon, catches up with the woman, ostensibly to retrieve his kidney and also to kill her, but he is also drawn to her. She may or may not be working for the CIA; Poe may or may not have killed his wife; a bag of heroin may or may not be stuffed inside him in the cavity where his kidney once resided; the kidney may or may not be in a small freezer the two of them haul around.
Lots of maybes, lots of hallucinatory writing and an oddly compelling story. If there is a downside to the book, it is that the first-person narrative is sometimes too literary, too clever for its own good, but the dreamy uncertainty of everything nudges you along until its not-very-happy conclusion. All in all, very impressive, a standout in what is becoming a crowded field.
­Randy Michael Signor

Although there are obvious biblical allusions in Baer's stylized debut, this noir tale takes no clearly biblical route. The characters' names promise a governing metaphor: there's Jude, an alluring sociopath; Eve, a black-tongued lesbian; Rose White, a virginal med student; and a bowling alley called the Inferno. There's also a beautiful young man afflicted since birth with HIV (born to die) who begs for a kiss before his demise. Even the title foreshadows a betrayal of biblical proportions. Yet this unrelentingly dark story, set in Colorado and Texas, features mostly underworld characters and a surreal sense of reality. Narrator Phineas Poe, a former investigator for the internal affairs division of Denver's police department, offers only a hallucinatory account that is both compelling and confusing. Just released from a psychiatric hospital, he meets Jude, has sex and awakens in a tub full of ice. He discovers that she's cut into him and stolen one of his kidneys. Despite his weakened state, he tracks her down. On his way, he encounters the Blister, a corrupt cop who reveals that Jude replaced his kidney with a bag of heroin and is using him to smuggle dope. Should the bag dissolve, Poe will die. Should he remove it, he might find a bomb. On the other hand, Jude may be exploiting him as a live carrier of his other kidney for efficient delivery to the man with the money. Poe definitely has problems, not the least of which is the haunting memory of his wife's wretched death. His dilemma only worsens when he joins Jude in her nefarious career, falls in love with her and anticipates her betrayal. Yet she's not what she seems and where they ultimately end up provides this intriguing tale with a quirky, redemptive glow. Editor, Courtney Hodell; agent; Daniel Mandel. Author tour. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Not for the faint of heart, Kiss Me, Judas starts off bloody and zooms nonstop to a gripping climax. Baer's minimalist debut novel is reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino film--dark, graphic, and twisted--but without the quirky humor. Phineas Poe, an ex-Internal Affairs cop, walks straight out of a mental hospital into his worst nightmare: after drinks with a mysterious woman, he comes to in a bloody, ice-filled hotel bathtub--missing a kidney. "If you want to live, call 911," reads the note left with him. Poe breaks out of the hospital in search of Jude, his seductress, unsure of whether he will kill her or have sex with her and then kill her. Flashbacks and hallucinations, drug-induced and otherwise, hint that Poe has more to deal with than organ-stealing vamps: namely, the bizarre circumstances of his wife's death. A paranoid thriller; for public libraries.--Christine Perkins, Jackson Cty Lib. Svcs., Medford, OR

Library Journal

Stylistically superb debut that reinvents the thriller, dots every noir, and slashes every t, each note pitch-perfect as a presto from hell. After six years with Denver's Internal Affairs Division as a rat sniffing about the IAD itself, Phineas Poe has a nervous breakdown, his wife dies (leukemia? suicide? murder?), he turns himself in at a psychiatric hospital, and when he gets out six months later, he goes to a bar, picks up a prostituteþor, rather, Jude picks him up, and slips some horse tranquilizer into his Tequila Sunrise. He awakens half-frozen under reddish ice in the bathtub, a telephone by the tub and a note in his fingers saying "if you want to live call 911." When the emergency team lifts him out of the tub, Poe finds that Jude has performed some rough surgery on him, i.e., stolen his left kidney and stapled him back up. All this is told with great panache and subzero cool. Surprisingly, scene follows scene with no dimming of invention (Poe's jolted, for example, to learn that Jude also left a large deposit of raw heroin in his lower intestine before closing up his body). Will he be surgically manipulated again later? A killer puts a gun to Poe's head, offering him $100,000 to murder Jude and retrieve the kidney for the killer's dying brother. But Poe's so filled with liquid Valium and morphine that one can't tell whether he's tripping, as the dead walk and talk and long scenes waver in graphic dreams. Baer will almost certainly write better books than this, but probably not with such youthful verve, bare nerve-ends, or frigidly droll, dead-on metaphors. May his second be just as trim, while taking a bigger bite out of darkness and the big sleep. (Author tour)

Kirkus Reviews