J. G. Ballard’s graphic, violent novel is controversial wherever it is read. The book’s characters are obsessed with automobile accidents and are determined to narrate the horrors of the car crash as luridly as possible. In the words of the novel’s protagonist, the wounds caused by automobile collisions are “the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology.” Read this novel and learn why David Cronenberg fought to turn it into a film starring James Spader.
In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a “TV scientist” turned “nightmare angel of the highways,” experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor.
A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society’s increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.
J. G. Ballard wrote many highly regarded science fiction novels as well as the classic Empire of the Sun, which was filmed by Steven Spielberg.
