Penny Dreadful | Will Christopher Baer

Penny Dreadful | Will Christopher Baer | Dark, surreal, poetic, brilliant, and worthwhile

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Penny Dreadful

	Penny Dreadful Will Christopher Baer MacAdam/Cage, 2006 - 367 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

When Phineas Poe is enlisted by his old ally, Detective Moon, to find a missing cop named Jimmy Sky, he is drawn into the Game of Tongues, a violent fantasy game played by the disaffected and delusional in the punk clubs, rooftops, and sewers of Denver. With everyone he meets possessing multiple personalities and his own identity slipping away, Poe realizes if he can hang on to his sanity long enough to find Jimmy Sky, he might just beat the game.

Wonderfully Psychotic

Will Baer's 3 books go together in some strange, twisted series. If you like Chuck Palahniuk, and his twisted writings, you'll love Baer's stuff. Crazy plots, great writing style, dramatic twists, crude images, and a little bit of love.
I recommend these books to everyone

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Dark, surreal, poetic, brilliant, and worthwhile

Someone has written "Dark Poetry." This could not be more accurate. PENNY DREADFUL is one of the most starkly beautiful books ever to come out. That said, I have to admit that I haven't yet read "Kiss Me, Judas," but plan to get it sometime this week. Back to PD: Surreal and fresh, this book nevertheless disturbs on so many levels---any good book will. But what makes it truly unique is the way the author's mind works-you can literally see the wheels turning; not in a bad way; and it's not at all predictable. If you want a touch-feely "feel-good" book, this is not it. But it is great fiction by a very talented writer who I hope we see more of.

If you enjoy the works of Chuck Palahinuk, Jackson McCrae, Bret Easton Ellis, and other "new age" writers, then this is the book for you.

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2nd in a trilogy, wonderful.

His work is just unreal - unique and fantastic. Read all of his books.

A Surreal And Fantasian View Of Skid Row

Really when I think about it, I found Penny Dreadful to be a mediocre sequel to Kiss Me, Judas, but that could just be that Kiss Me, Judas was a like the experience with a new drug, one never gets that high you got the 1st time. I was probably just the absence of Jude and the missing descriptive torrid sex that came along with Jude, that failed to draw me in as much.
That's not to say that I didn't think Penny Dreadful wasn't an excellent novel, full of surrealism and noir tendencies, fuzzy transitions and other worldly characters who prance about in a stress, drug and sub-conscious induced haze. Numb to the world around them and their plural indentities, in and out of the game.
Phineas Poe our intrepid hero once again has found himself in a dangerous situation in the dregs of society, caught up in a web of drugs, fuzzy logic and dangerous individuals Poe must see through the B.S. which is much easier for him this go around without the morphine addiction and the whole coming to grips with his only having the one kidney.
Poe as a character seemed much more together, and a lot less confused in the 2nd Poe novel, which I greatly liked, he is a very excellently developed figure and I like him better without quite so much fog. Thats not to say that he isn't confused and disoriented several times in this novel, its just a little less.
Check it out, see what you think.

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dark surreal goth noir

Baer's fallen ex-cop Phineas Poe reappears in Denver, trying to reconnect with old friends, and finds a number of changes have taken place. His Denver is a cesspool of blood, stink, drugs, and psychoses; his friends such as they are, are more erratic, dangerous, vague and addicted than before. And their personalities, such as THEY are, are splitting in sick ways. Poe is eventually drawn into a (very) popular underground game, one in which eventually everyone in the book is found to be involved, The Game of Tongues, a twisted Goth competition and culture creating an alternate world. While it starts as a game of sorts, the culture is such that one doesn't need to wait too long before people are found to have been brutally murdered and the game is afoot in earnest.

Baer's cityscape is one of stench, disgust, sewers and alleys, quaking with dysfunction and seething with random brutality. Within that world, the characters are for the most part well drawn, though none is sympathetic in any real way, and the story becomes more and more interesting. The disjointed nature of the writing reflects the splintering of the people involved, and the eventual rebuilding and partial healing of some of them. Baer's world is not much fun to read about, but his construction is skilfully done, the book very well written. If you like this kind of topic you will find this an enjoyable read. It is at the very least inventive and imaginative.

This is considered a modern noir book; I would characterize is more in the Goth or torture-punk or anarcho-drug culture vein. There is little here, besides the endless nights, that remind one of Raymond Chandler.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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