Books: Hell's Half Acre by Will Christopher Baer

Humanity's sideshow

By John Ziebell

I remember taking Will Christopher Baer's first book, Kiss Me, Judas, on a trip to the coast years ago. The novel was billed as noir fiction, but it sure didn't fit the profile of a genre piece. It eschewed some standard conventions, such as quotation marks and clearly delineated transitions. The story was refreshingly literate, edgy and chaotic and darkly compelling, built on great images, some exquisite turns of phrase and severely twisted characters. If you read it late into the night in a cheap motel room the way I did, the creepiness factor might reach a point where you'd wedge a chair under the doorknob, like spies do in movies. On the other hand, you could also toss the thing aside as unreadable and forget to pack it in the morning. Love it or hate it, unconditionally...that's pretty much the deal with Baer.

I'm among Baer's fans, and therefore willing to make allowances for his literary quirks, so for me, the appearance of Hell's Half Acre is indeed a good thing. It's the third title in a series of sorts; you don't need to read Baer's previous novels to get the drift of this one, though they have been re-released by MacAdams/Cage. This is the most carefully crafted of the three in terms of structure, and the narrative arc, though a bit unbalanced, is far less obtuse than those of the author's previous efforts.

Phineas Poe, the novel's protagonist, is in San Francisco, on the path of his former lover Jude, who disappeared nearly five years before. Poe is a violent, morally ambiguous, mentally disturbed ex-cop with serious drug and alcohol abuse problems--our hero. And believe it or not, Baer can actually make us like him. Jude, a former soldier, makes her living by taking on gigs like stealing human kidneys--which was in fact how she and Poe met, but that's another story.

"I saved a guy's life just now and I think it was a mistake," Poe says in this novel's opening lines. And he's right, of course; he usually is, though being right rarely offers him any sort of advantage. It takes a few ticks for the semi-addled Poe to realize that the man he instinctively pulled from the path of an oncoming truck was one of four thugs hired to kill him and Jude five years ago. So he's not totally overwhelmed when she turns up in the very next alley, scalping the guy's partner...well, the scalping might be a bit much, even for Poe, but that's just the kind of girl Jude is.

The book takes off from there, following an erratic, overfueled and mostly satisfying course. "People crash into each other and things get interesting," Poe comments at one point, and that's pretty much the credo here. The story's darkest presence is a homicidal dilettante named John Ransom Miller, a wealthy lawyer whose fantasy is to film a cross between reality TV and snuff porn. Miller has some type of control over a whole cast of characters, including Jude. It's clear that he has to be stopped, and that only Poe has the wherewithal to do so; while the novel's resolution is a bit slow in coming, it's not an uninteresting wait. We get to meet a veritable sideshow of humanity along the way, most of them fascinating, from oddly atypical dopers, thugs and philosophical bartenders to a felonious senator who's a fetish amputee.

Comparing Baer with other writers is like comparing Tom Waits with...well, I guess that's the point. Baer creates a universe that teeters on the edge of human bankruptcy, but the vignettes that form it are so crisp, so inventive, comic and horrific in turn that we really don't care whether they combine to "mean" anything or not. It's a unique, often unsettling vision that has found its way to the page, one that should be appreciated for offering a truly fresh perspective on society's grittier potential, whether we choose to value its dark insights or not.