Kiss Me, Judas
January 24th, 2005
Everybody knows the following urban legend: A man picks up a hooker in a bar, takes her back to his hotel room, and wakes up in his bathtub missing a liver and holding a note that says “if you want to live call 911.” Hell, it’s the story of my life. Will Christopher Baer takes this as the starting point for this novel, his first. Phineas Poe is an ex-investigator for the police department’s internal affairs division. In the past few months his wife died and he lost both is mind and his job. Although it’s questionable that he was ever sane in the first place. The first thing he does after being released from a mental institution is lose his liver. The problem is that Poe thinks he’s in love with Jude, the woman who took it. He also thinks he wants to kill her.
Kiss Me, Judas is narrated in a hallucinogenic blur. From Poe’s first-person account we are treated to this suspenseful mystery tale through a haze of medication and good, old-fashioned insanity. How did Poe’s wife really die? What happened to Poe’s liver? Who the hell are these people around him? The linear story is broken into fragments; events are sometimes revised and replaced, people are mutable, but it’s all convincing. This type of novel would get on my nerves if it was poorly done. Baer sometimes lays it on pretty thick with the Biblical allusions, but for me this was a compulsive, sickly fascinating read.