Original Essays
Under the Skin
by Will Christopher Baer
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"Baer's writing has an undeniable force ? it's sordid and entrancing, hallucinatory and yet given to brutal realism." The Times (London)
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"Baer's language is hip, spare, brutal, sometimes gorgeous....The payoff...is the voyeuristic glimpse the novel affords into the imaginary labyrinth inhabited by obsessive, nihilistic gothic gamers." Publishers Weekly
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"Stylistically superb debut that reinvents the thriller....Baer will almost certainly write better books than this, but probably not with such youthful verve, bare nerve-ends, or frigidly droll, dead-on metaphors." Kirkus Reviews
I never consciously set out to write noir, although the books and movies I
gravitate toward generally tend in that direction.
I started writing, as a kid, my own mutant science fiction: the Wild West crossed
with Middle Earth, such that a werewolf might coexist on the same plane with
Billy the Kid, goblins and zombies. In college, I primarily studied Shakespeare,
Faulkner,
James
Joyce. The stuff that really grabs me is prose that hits like a blunt object.
I write as internally as I can manage, by which I mean I try to turn the narrator's
body inside out, to literally get under the skin and find the nausea, vertigo,
and despair inherent in ordinary personal interactions. I have a tendency to
focus on the visceral minutiae, so when I read my work in public, it feels like
the stuff of affliction. One reviewer called the Phineas books "existential
noir," a phrase that annoys me intellectually, but sometimes feels accurate.
As I've mentioned in various interviews, I write mostly in binges. I write
best when I hole up somewhere, isolate myself completely, what I call going
under. I finished Kiss
Me, Judas on a two-week writing jag in a borrowed artist's studio in the
East Bay that had a coffeemaker, cheap stereo, and toilet. And disturbing paintings
on the walls. Penny
Dreadful spilled out over the course of several months in a Motel 6, while
Hell's Half
Acre was written in a rented room in North Beach above a bar. To my mind,
the Poe
books are primarily about betrayal, guilt, redemption — the ways that people
damage and fail each other. But they are also about the shifts that occur in
everyday reality. I burrowed deepest into this idea in Penny Dreadful,
where the reality morphs constantly, moving from the realm of a shared consciousness
in a fantasy role-playing game to an internal deconstruction of Ulysses.
There's a fair amount of Biblical imagery in my books, no doubt because of
my Southern upbringing, which accounts for a certain hillbilly goth feel. But
my books are also all about love — whenever someone asks what my books
are like, the first words out of my mouth are "scary love stories." Everyone
comes from a fucked-up family, everyone was damaged by their parents, and everyone
is trying to find some kind of love that makes sense — so what else is
there to write about? But what most interests me are the ways that people wound
each other when they are simply trying to love each other. And when a story
is coming to me, I follow my characters. I follow my obsessions, and so the
stories that unfold in the Phineas books tend toward crime and violence, mystery
and erotica. I just try to get under the skin.
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