Baise-Moi by Virginie Despentes (1994): Fast, ludicrous, nihilistic

Virginie Despentes must have written her first novel with a wrap of speed, a bottle of whiskey and an overflowing ashtray cluttering the desk. If you’re looking for rounded characters and subtle insights into the human heart, best head for the exit right now. Baise-Moi is a fast, ludicrous, superficial kill-streak of a novel that fuses the extremist strain in French fiction – Sade, Bataille, Genet – with pulp aesthetics and road movie romanticism.

The plot? Two young women, sick and tired of society, men, the middle-class and everything else, load up on guns and embark on a murderous rampage across France, fuelled by liquor, sex and weed. That’s it. Despentes would go on to direct a notorious film adaptation whose porn-star cast, unsimulated sex and extreme violence would see it banned in France and beyond.

French culture can seem like a museum of itself, where the aura of refinement and reverence for the past are stifling. Despentes’s liveliness owes much to her schooling in punk, with its snarling disdain for respectable taste and bourgeois convention. Baise-Moi is a novel by a writer bored with novels, more turned on by video games, slasher movies and porn. Despentes has since mellowed out, to a degree. Her most affecting writing is in King Kong Theory, where she recounts her time spent working as a prostitute in prose that wavers between shame and defiance, empathy and disgust.

Baise-Moi is all cheap thrills and homicidal delirium. You can tell Despentes got her kicks while knocking it out. It’s a nihilist fantasy delivering what many of us have longed to do at some point or another: step into a crowd and blast anything that moves. Despentes can’t have known that scenarios like that of Baise-Moi would play out for real on the streets of 21st-century France – the rage of the banlieues spewing death and mayhem over comfortable society, all those Avenging Angels striding through gun-smoke, exalted with hate, merciless and ready to die.