godspeed
forthcoming Nov 2006, MacAdam/Cage.
If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now?
--The Judge / Blood Meridian / Cormac McCarthy
--from the publisher
According to Milton, heaven and hell are but a hand's breadth apart. In GODSPEED, there is no heaven or hell. There is only "the presidio," a lawless noir purgatory populated by fugitive souls, fallen angels, demon children, immortals, and the undead. Moving among them is a complicated hero in Ryder Fell.mercenary thief, repentant womanizer, and sometime savior of lost children--afflicted with the "godspeed," a dizzying array of paranormal talents he can neither control or explain. The worst of these are nightmare visions of black doors All hell breaks loose when an exiled undead soul, in the body of a young girl, borrows the godspeed from Ryder and plunges through the wrong door...Milton had one thing right--the next world is a heartbeat away from this one, an easy jump for the lucky few who know how to secure passage. For the rest of us, the real hell is in the journey.
--from the author
"THE LAST TIME I got down on my knees and asked the Lord in earnest to keep my soul, I was thirteen. I was prone to greed. I asked Him for the juice I needed to escalate things with the cheerleader next door, for the quantum mechanics necessary to throw a curve ball that dropped like the guts fell out of it. I asked Him for the shadow powers of time travel, invisibility. Now I ask for two minutes. Two minutes are the flash of insect wings in my blind spot, dead leaves falling from a winter sky, a holiday in hell. Two minutes were all the time it took the baby to drown. Two minutes are all I want, and given two minutes audience with the Lord, I wouldn't fuck around. I would not be greedy. I wouldn't ask Him to reverse time and I wouldn't bug Him about unrealistic shit like world harmony. I would ask Him to send me a savior with the strength to tear out my eyes and relieve me of my affliction, the dread talent the men of my family call the godspeed. I don't imagine it would take more than two minutes..."
--RYDER FELL
-from the author
GODSPEED is my ongoing obsession and freefalling death dream. Godspeed is my personal house of leaves, ever expanding, bigger inside than out and filled with private horrors. In Godspeed, the demons lurk in unlikely hiding places--a shard of light, a handful of dust, a broken tooth. The power to see and access the dread doors passes from one character to another like plague. Godspeed is an apocalyptic noir, a horror quest for salvation I expect will run past a thousand pages, over the course of several books. I'll count myself lucky to survive the first installment and begin the second. I am working on Godspeed even now. And given two minutes, two days, two years more, I will doubtless still be working on it.
--WILL CHRISTOPHER BAER, 2006
read a sample from godspeed
phineas poe collection
Guy walks into a bar, orders a drink. Girl sits down next to him. Long devastating legs in a short red dress, she.s pure muscle and hard as cut glass with a scar at the corner of her mouth. She carries an antique surgeon.s bag. Guy takes her back to his room, pays her $200, wakes up with staples in his guts, peeing into a tube...
PHINEAS POE is equal parts love letter, black noir, revenge fantasy, suicide pact, Greek tragedy, urban myth exploded, nihilistic joke.
Disgraced cop turned junkie turned fool for love turned apocalyptic antihero Phineas Poe emerges from a psych ward five days before Christmas and tumbles for the beautiful predatory Jude, army sniper turned streetwise assassin, sex artist and organ thief, who cuts him open and leaves him to fate. Reborn in a bath of ice, Phineas tracks Jude from the snowy back alleys of Denver across the scorched Texas desert to the millennial wasteland of San Francisco, descending into a nightmare realm where every act of perversion has a high price tag and willing disciples, a world of sadomasochist blood theater, murderous role playing games, existential snuff films. Distorting the lines between victim and accomplice, torturer and protector, the myth of Orpheus is deconstructed on a razorblade as Phineas and Jude chase each other through a hell of their own making.
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hell's half acre
Kidnapping, snuff films, amputee geeks and a requiem of lost love... Cast adrift after the blood symphony of Penny Dreadful, Poe is looking for answers in the form of a woman. He tracks Jude to San Francisco, where he finds her involved with John Ransom Miller, a wealthy sociopath with a mysterious hold over her. Jude is nursing a revenge fantasy against a U.S. Senator with an amputation fetish who wants her dead, but she needs Miller's help, and in exchange, Miller wants Jude to help him pull off a high-profile kidnapping and make a snuff film on the side. Poe throws himself into the mix, hoping he can save Jude from herself, make sense of his past, and safely navigate a torturous internal landscape he calls hell's half acre.
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read the first chapter
penny dreadful
To play the game of tongues, you must first understand the caste system….Phineas Poe, antihero of Kiss Me, Judas, returns to Denver from harrowing adventures in Mexico to find that reality has been rewritten and the laws of reason redrawn. When Poe is enlisted by his old ally, Detective Moon, to find a missing cop named Jimmy Sky, he finds himself perilously drawn into the game of tongues, a violent fantasy game played out by disaffected college drones, hacker kids, and goth refugees in underground punk clubs, on rooftops, and in sewers. Everyone he meets has multiple personalities, and before long Poe begins to lose track of his own various identities. If he can hang onto his sanity long enough to find Jimmy Sky, he might just beat the game.
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kiss me, judas
Have you ever loved someone who's mortally wounded you? Phineas Poe, disgraced cop and morphine addict has just been released from a psych ward. He meets a beautiful woman and killer-for-hire named Jude in a hotel bar. Red dress. black hair, body like a knife. He takes her back to his room and wakes the next morning in a bathtub full of blood, missing a kidney. Dragging himself from a hospital bed, Phineas discovers he wants to get close to Jude like a hunger--and he wants to kill her. Finding her is a downward spiral. Falling for her is the start of a twisted love story that takes him from the snowy streets of Denver to the high plains of Texas where the boundaries between victim and torturer — killer and accomplice — become nightmarishly distorted.
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Available Short Fiction
- Seizure
- BOMB, Winter 97
Order back issues here!
- Suffer the Fool
- ChuckPalahniuk.net, Winter 04
Previously published in BOMB, Spring 99
Available here!
- The Velvet
- Nerve, October 2000
Available here! (subscription needed)
- Eyes
- Nerve, February, 2000
Available here! (subscription needed)