Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Will C Baer is my favourite author EVER., 24 May 2011
This review is from: Penny Dreadful (Paperback)
This is the second instalment in Will C Baer's Phineas Poe collection, and although I prefer the first; Kiss Me Judas, this is still an amazing and fascinating read. If you're thinking of buying this one, you might as well get the third instalment Hells Half Acre!
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5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
insanely brilliant, 21 Feb 2002
For all the warped fantasy fan out there is a book where one's own sanity is put to the test. The only way to read this book is to sit back and let it flow, for it's plot is quite neurotic, and narrative transition from character to character whom additionally take the form of an entirely different people. The book can be summarise as mad! From it emerges an underworld, who's cult basis is the "game of tongues," and that is only a small essence of the book amplitude for weirdness. Penny Dreadful is refreshingly crazy, it plot so original, so mystifying, it leaves the reading studded, at as to how a person could come up with a story of such stimulating entertained, around the "idea of eating other's tongues." Do not be put off the delirium of it all for, for though the book entails little in the way of universal themes or a classical sense of style, it is fresh, entertaining and more than slightly out-here. It marks the successful attempt in braking of the tradition literary style. For it is one of the few modern fantasy that isn't a pretentious modern, and will most likely, with time, become cute classic.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Noir with a twist.... it's good!, 30 Mar 2000
By Brandon Taper - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Penny Dreadful (Hardcover)
I have just recently finished reading the second in Baer's "Poe" trilogy, "Penny Dreadful" --- sequel to the amazingly prolific, "Kiss Me Judas". This novel however creates a world all its own. Baer is certainly a great talent, and his second novel's detail and plot are superb. One can picture the dark, gritty nights in Denver when Phineas Poe, (our anithero,) returns to find himself losing his identity -- or what has become of his identity -- more and more each day. He becomes lost in a "Game of Tongues"...which ceases to blow my mind when I remember how rich in noir detail the "horrific" game was described. (I won't give anything away, especially of the game's nature, I despise reviewers who do this.) All in all, Baer has great insight when it comes to the mundane, unoriginal surroundings we find ourselves in everyday. Whether it be his describing a homeless man on the street corner, with his nose bloodied, his fingernails bitten to the ends or his describing the dark, dank Denver alleys, he does it well. This novel is filled with everything a reader can long for. Baer pulls off noir with his own sense of style, and he does it with passion. Writing at its best.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
dark, mesmerizing, genuinely creepy, 10 Oct 2003
By David Batcher - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Penny Dreadful (Paperback)
Amid the slick writing, the grimly fascinating characters, plots, and setpieces, it's easy to miss the literary intelligence that's at work here. Baer gives us not only an addictive mystery-thriller, which is genuinely creepy and disturbing, but also a submerged meditation on the slipperiness of identity. There's even some well-placed commentary on _Ulysses_ here. Baer's vision ain't pretty, but it's compelling, and I think he's one to watch.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Atmospheric Amazing, 7 May 2001
By Bob Fisher - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Penny Dreadful (Paperback)
Enigmatic and sublime. This stark noirish nightmare is as good as they get. Baer makes what almost could be called a surrealist hardboiled novel. Without lossing control of the narrative, Baer does a superb job crossing the border between naturalist crime writing and heady phantasmagoria. Phineas Poe is one of the most interesting, beguiling anti-heros within the noir genre, a tight lipped drugged out sam spade caught up in a underground world of would be vampires.
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