The Get Off

A good life is a life well lived full of new adventures, meeting new people, and experiencing new things. On this criteria Angel Dare has had one of the best lives, she is always meeting new people and finding herself in new places, but not for the reasons she would want. From adult film star to victim, to vigilante, Angel as been there, seen that, done them all. The Get Off by Christa Faust may just be the last chapter in her story, a full life for her, but one that has led to many others being cut short. 

What do you do when the reason for your existence is stolen from you? This is the situation that Angel finds herself in when her vigilante quest comes near to its end. What will Angel do when the man she swore to kill is dead? She should probably start dealing with all the things she compartmentalised whist she was in the killing zone. Like the fact that she has not had a period in months, and someone just asked her when the baby is due. 

I am a huge fan of Pulp Crime and Faust is an author who knows how to do it brilliantly. If you are thinking of catching your breath whist reading, there is not much time for that in Get Off. This is a road story of mayhem, with Angel leaving the corpses of the good and the bad in her wake. There is no real plan to Angel’s madness, just a need to get away. She befriends those that would help her only to put her in danger. 

Why does Angel even bother to carry on? She could take that last step and end it all, but now there is someone else she must think about, but this is not really Angel’s style. There is a refreshingly harsh streak of anti-hero in Angel. She is selfish in a way that feels real, she is not able to tackle what she called her ‘situation.’ Instead, she continues to get into more scrapes killing and creating new enemies on the way. 

As a road story, the book has locations that Angel drives up to and causes havoc. We have a shootout in a clinic, a rest at the rodeo, and a fire at the cattle farm. Chaos and action follow Angel everywhere and it is an exhilarating ride. No one is safe around her and that adds to the tension. 

The tension works because Angel knows that she is messed up, we spend the whole story with her, and she is aware that she is a bad luck penny. As the book nears its end, she must deal fully with her ‘situation’ and that humanises her. The book may be pulp, but Angel has genuine issues, although heightened the book respects the fact that Angel’s mental health has taken a real battering throughout her life. 

This is the final part of Angel’s story, and I have not read the other books in the series, but this did not detract from Get Off. The previous tales are spoken of but are not inherent for the book to work. Faust did the correct thing when writing a sequel, let it stand on its own and encourage the reader to go out and buy the earlier books, that is certainly something I plan to do. The Get Off is a riotous example of Pulp Crime fiction, full of bullets, but also pathos.