A review by mylogicisfuzzy
Fantômas by John Ashbery, Marcel Allain, Pierre Souvestre

1.0

I think the fact that the authors were given a month in which to write Fantomas is telling. It is just terrible, sensationalist, yes, but superficial, with no depth to it, a convoluted plot and hordes of uninteresting and underdeveloped characters. It's also dated badly. I guess the fact that we have this criminal who continues to get away with it (since there are 30 odd Fantomas books, this is not a spoiler) made it a bit subversive at the time and perhaps this was the appeal to the surrealists but as a literary work, I found no value in it whatsoever - I read it because it is on Guardian's list of 1,000 novels everyone should read. Really? It's a pulp novel and not a particularly good one at that.