Jean de La Hire

Early french pulp. I'm not a big fan of pulp but this is quite different from others i've read. Its a far more... psychological work than i was expecting. A woman spends the entire opening chapter trying to shake off the effects of a drug she was given and get a grip on herself after waking to find she has been kidnapped. Its quite effecting.
A lot of descriptions of how people are feeling and how their feelings change. You'd rarely see an enemy become a friend in a Burroughs book for instance. The translator who quite dislikes* the book considered those sorts of things inconsistencies of character and therefore flaws but i really enjoyed these shifts, they felt quite human to me.
Its sort of like a pulp mixed with a melodrama. Oh and its also set a few years after the martian invasion from H.G. Wells 'War of the Worlds' which is pretty neat.
There are a couple of strong female characters which always nice. One of them is kind of a bitch too, which is also welcome :), she's pretty much an anti-hero. Female characters rarely get to act badly and still be the good guys.
It's still a pulp though and suffers a bit from its serial origin although not as much as the translator believes. Its main issue is that it goes on longer than it probably should and then just kind of tapers away at the end.
The literary equivalent of a B-Movie but of the better variety :) .

*I assume the editor also hates this book as BlackCoatPress edition has innumerable errors. Actually they're not innumerable because i counted all 91 of them!!! Hopefully future readers will not have to deal with those problems as i sent the complete list of mistakes to the publisher. Luckily they're not a Take-Away or i'm sure they would spit in my food ;) . As it is i'll be upgrading my anti-virus before opening their next response :P .… (más)