The Monomaniac (La bête humaine)

Séverine uttered an involuntary cry, and Roubaud turned round, terrified. p. 196.

This striking work, now published for the first time in England, but a hundred thousand copies whereof have been sold in France, is one of the most powerful novels that M. Émile Zola has written. It will be doubly interesting to English readers, because for them it forms a missing link in the famous Rougon-Macquart series.
The student of Zola literature will remember in the Assommoir that handsome Lantier whose heartlessness was to cost Gervaise so many tears. Jacques Lantier, the chief character in this Bête Humaine , this Human Animal which I have ventured to call the Monomaniac , is one of their children. It is he who is the monomaniac. His monomania consists in an irresistible prurience for murder, and his victims must be women, just like that baneful criminal who was performing his hideous exploits in the streets of the city of London in utter defiance of the police, about the time M. Zola sat down to pen this remarkable novel, and from whom, maybe, he partly took the idea.
Every woman this Jacques Lantier falls in love with, nay, every girl from whom he culls a kiss, or whose bare shoulders or throat he happens to catch a glimpse of, he feels an indomitable craving to slaughter! And this abominable thirst is, it appears, nothing less than an irresistible desire to avenge certain wrongs of which he has lost the exact account, that have been handed down to him, through the males of his line, since that distant age when prehistoric man found shelter in the depths of caverns.
Around this peculiar being, who in other respects is like any ordinary mortal, M. Émile Zola has grouped some very carefully studied characters. All are drawn with a firm, masterly hand; all live and breathe. Madame Lebleu, caught with her ear to the keyhole, is worthy of Dickens. So is Aunt Phasie, who has engaged in a desperate underhand struggle with her wretch of a husband about a miserable hoard of £40 which he wants to lay hands on. The idea of the jeering smile on her lips, which seem to be repeating to him, Search! search! as she lies a corpse on her bed in the dim light of a tallow candle, is inimitable.