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I thought I’d take a side-step from re-reading Barker’s novels to look at some of his plays, written in the days prior to the publication of (but in some cases alongside the writing of) the first Books of Blood stories and The Damnation Game. A good selection are currently published in individual editions from the Clive Barker Archive, complete with Barker cover art, photos, and informative afterwords.

Barker had been creating plays since his days as a teenager at Quarry Bank School in Liverpool, which from the start were both horrific and fantastic in nature. According to Douglas E Winter in his Barker biography The Dark Fantastic, Voodoo (1967) was “a living horror film”, Inferno (1967) a “weird reinvention of Dante” complete with “Hell and Nazis and God knows”, and the title of Neongonebony (1968) refers to our current neon-lit age descending into a bone-choked post-apocalypse. The Holly and the Ivy (1970, when Barker would have been eighteen), was a three-hour take on the King Arthur story, ending with the revelation of a homosexual relationship between two of its main characters, which caused some consternation among the school staff—not for the first time, with Barker. These early works were collaborative and partly improvised (an approach Barker would encourage even in his later works, as he says in his introductions to the published editions: “These plays are not finished things, they’re invitations to collective work.”). Nevertheless, he was the one who assigned parts and determined the purpose of each scene within an overall narrative. Playwriting, acting and production continued for Barker throughout his time at university (where he switched from philosophy to English Literature), in first the Hydra Theatre Company, then the Theatre of the Imagination, and for a short while the Mute Pantomime Theatre. These all seem to have been small groups, mostly of the same people (Pinhead actor Doug Bradley, and Hellraiser II scriptwriter Pete Atkins, for instance). They all moved to London around 1977, and formed the Dog Company, where Barker, now out of university, concentrated entirely on the stage. He continued to act in his own plays for a while, but gave that up in 1980 to concentrate on writing and directing, and in 1982 gave up directing too.

The three plays I chose to read (and I’ve seen none of these performed, so I’m sure I’m missing a lot of how they’d actually be experienced) all had the more obviously fantastical titles. First among them was The Magician: A Farce in the Style of the Commedia dell’Arte, which was first performed from November to December 1978. As the title says, this is a take on the traditional comedy form the Harlequinade, with its set character-types (Pantalone, Columbine, Pierrot, and so on). Here, Pantalone is the governor of an unnamed European city-state, where rumours arrive that the great magician Cagliostro is on his way. But is he a real magician or “all reputation, no power”? It turns out he did perform one genuine act of magic many years ago, the creation of an homunculus, which he proceeded to drown, in horror at what he’d made. But the creature survived, and was raised in ignorance of what it really was, to become the governor of this city-state. The play ends with a reconciliation between the father/creator Cagliostro and his fantastical “son”.

The History of the Devil was first performed in September 1980, and went on to have a run at the Edinburgh Fringe, where it was listed among the twelve best plays of the festival. It would be the Dog Company’s most performed play. In it, the Devil has himself put on trial in the hope that, if found innocent, he’ll be allowed back into Heaven. Witnesses (most of them summoned from the grave) appear, and their testimonies turn into on-stage enactments, including the story of the Devil’s first arrival on Earth (in what seems to be medieval Russia), his encounter with Christ in the desert, his attempt to get a Renaissance architect to build him a palace (if not on Earth, then in Hell), and his freeing some women accused of being witches in Puritan America. For me, although these episodes provide plenty of variety, they don’t really add up to an argument for or against the Devil as a source of evil, and it’s the court scenes that are the best parts of the play. The Devil’s ultimate justification is that none of this would be any different if he weren’t here:

“Is there a moral sky over me? No. Does this dirt suffer morality? No. In all the natural world there’s no moral thing. You ask why you are unhappy. Why, why? Morality. You go against nature.”

Frankenstein in Love was first performed from April to May 1982, after which it was taken to Holland, Belgium, and again to the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s set in an unnamed South American country at the point where its current dictator, Perez, is being overthrown by the revolutionary forces led by El Coco. Perez’s chief executioner, it turns out, is Doctor Frankenstein (who has been allowed to experiment to his heart’s content on the regime’s political criminals), while El Coco is actually his first creation, the famed “monster”. After the revolution, El Coco is assassinated, but, being dead already, cannot die, and returns to revenge himself on Doctor Frankenstein, arriving on his wedding day (where the doctor is marrying one of his experimental subjects). Of the three plays, this is the most out-and-out horrific, dripping in gore, death, shock and transgression, including a man’s heart being ripped out on stage, another having his head trapped in a box of knives, and another having a new face sewn on, all wrapped up in an air of political oppression, medical experimentation, plague, cannibalism, and the misuse of corpses (“hardly the standard ingredients of British theatre” as the reviewer for The Scotsman put it).

Despite the political background, Frankenstein in Love doesn’t feel like a political statement (unless it’s in the overall tone of misused power and constant backstabbing), but rather presents a vision of a world in which all is merely flesh and death, but in which flesh is not ended by, but transformed by, death. As Veronique, one of Frankenstein’s experiments, says:

“Yes, I’ve learned that lesson. Flesh is trash. Its natural state is meat. Everybody is just meat. The rest is the will to be more than meat.”

Or, Frankenstein himself:

“We look at our bodies and we see them putrefying around our living minds and we know, finally, that the enemy is our flesh. The body is a prison and must be escaped by metaphysics, or changed by wit and knife and courage.”

Far more relentlessly grim than anything Barker put into his fiction—perhaps doubly so because it was being put on live, on stage, where the horror is unrelenting—it was actually written shortly after the most powerful of Barker’s initial Books of Blood stories, “In the Hills, the Cities”.

Aside from the general air of horror, these plays are speckled with hints of what was to come in Barker’s more well-known works. For instance Christ, in The History of the Devil, when planning his means of martyrdom, asks “Isn’t there something they do in the East with hooks in the skin?”, which recalls the hooks in the skin in Hellraiser. In Frankenstein in Love, after El Coco’s assassination (by fire), he becomes a skinless walking corpse, “A walking anatomy lesson”—which recalls Frank from Hellraiser, as well as the “anatomy lesson, raw and wet” of Gentle’s homunculus in Imajica.

More generally, I think it’s possible to see how Barker’s approach to writing fiction has been informed by his background as a playwright. All three of these plays feature a narrator who speaks to the audience and interacts with the characters, and who talks knowingly of the events being played out as a drama (somewhat like Puck when he addresses the audience at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, only in this case throughout the play), and there’s certainly a similar tone in Barker’s fiction, where he’s always highlighting archetypal aspects like character roles and story-types (it’s so ingrained in Barker’s prose style it’s hard to isolate in a good quote, but here he’s describing Gentle and Judith’s love affair in Imajica: “one death short of tragedy, and one marriage short of farce”). In addition, I think his penchant for making his monsters such eloquent, often philosophical beasts, is rooted in writing them as characters for the stage.

The theme that kept standing out for me, even if it wasn’t the main one of each play, was that of monstrous sons and their fathers/creators. I’ve already mention the reunion of the homunculus and his creator in The Magician, but there’s also the Devil seeking reconciliation with his father/creator God in The History of the Devil, and El Coco/Frankenstein’s monster seeking revenge on his father/creator (he calls him his father, but it’s pointed out a couple of times that, no, he’s his creator) in Frankenstein in Love. In the latter two plays, these attempts at reconciliation (if the last one can even be called that) end in failure, if not tragedy. This is a theme I thought popped up in some of the early Books of Blood stories, too, such as “Skins of the Fathers” and “Rawhead Rex”, and now I think about it can also be found in The Damnation Game (most explicitly in the character Breer, who’s resurrected by Mamoulian, and so in a sense becomes his “monster”, though the Faustian pact-that-isn’t-a-pact between Whitehead and Mamoulian perhaps makes more sense if read as a father/creator-son relationship) and in Gentle’s created double in Imajica.

The end of the Dog Company came, ironically, not through failure but success. As well as Frankenstein in Love (the first of Barker’s plays to be directed by someone else, which was partly done to ensure the Arts Council took the company more seriously), they put on another Barker play at the Edinburgh Fringe, The Secret Life of Cartoons. This was enough of a hit that the troupe recognised they’d need to bring in other people to give it its full due if they were to take it further (which they did), and this meant leaving the days of a six-actor, one-playwright fringe group behind. Barker continued to write plays (for the Cockpit Youth Theatre), but was already working on The Books of Blood and The Damnation Game, with Hellraiser and international bestsellerdom looming fast.

First published in 1987, Emlyn’s Moon is the sequel to The Snow Spider, but one in which the first book’s protagonist, boy-magician Gwyn Griffiths, is now a secondary character. (Which often seems to happen with boy magicians. Once they’ve come into their powers, particularly if that has involved learning a certain amount of wisdom—which discounts you, Harry Potter—they’re too remote and powerful to be protagonists, and only come in towards the end to help the new main characters. For instance, Ged in the Earthsea books, and Will in The Dark is Rising series.)

Emlyn’s Moon is about Nia, middlemost of the seven Lloyd children (Alun Lloyd was Gwyn’s best friend in the first book). Nia feels she’s useless at everything, and is frequently told so by her teacher at school and her brothers (“Nia-can’t-do-nothing! Nia-in-the-middle! Nia’s got a funny tooth, and her nose goes squiggle, squiggle!”). When her family moves from their farm to town, where her father has taken on a butcher’s shop, they pass a former chapel (“the chapel that wasn’t a chapel now, but a home for someone”) whose door and gate have been repainted in bright pink, gold, and blue. Outside it, she sees Emlyn Llewelyn, a slightly older boy from school, but she’s told (by virtually everyone) that the chapel is “a bad place”, and not to go there, because “Something happened there, didn’t it?” Though no one will tell her what.

One day, though, she bumps into Emlyn in town, they get talking, and he invites her up to the home he shares with his father, a somewhat gruff artist currently living without his wife, who left abruptly a while ago with their new baby. Emlyn later tells Nia he doesn’t know where his mother is, only that Gwyn Griffith’s father took her away, and that she said something about living in the moon. As a result of this, there’s a breach between the Llewelyns and Griffiths, even though Emlyn is Gwyn’s cousin. Nia tells Emlyn and his father about a school project she has to do, where everyone in class has to make, write, or paint something about the town they live in. As she thinks she can’t do anything, she’s dreading it. But Emlyn’s father, Idris, questions her and discovers she can sew, so he fetches a large piece of canvas, and tells her to create a collage. She takes it home, but works on it in secret.

The growing friendship between Nia and Emlyn soon hits a snag. She’d promised that he could buy the Lloyd family’s sheepdog, which isn’t enjoying life in town, only to find her father has given it to the Griffithses. Nia feels ashamed and Emlyn feels betrayed, and it ends in a fight between Emlyn and Gwyn (who, having learned from the playground fight in the previous book, still uses a little magic, but ultimately lets his cousin win).

After this, Emlyn grows increasingly isolated, and when Nia learns about the magic world Gwyn is involved in, and sees, one night, pale child-like figures walking on the outskirts of the town, she worries they’re here to take Emlyn away, just as they took Gwyn’s sister Bethan. She decides she needs to solve the mystery of what happened to Emlyn’s mother, and reunite the two.

The Snow Spider seemed, to me, readable as both a magical tale for pre-teens and as a more complex story for older readers, and Emlyn’s Moon takes that even further. Although there’s no evident fantasy element for at least the first half of the book, the story is carried by the light comedy of Nia’s supposed uselessness, and her attempts to procure materials for her collage (including snipping a section off her sister’s music teacher’s net curtains, which is soon discovered). It’s the subtleties of the relationships—Nia and her large family, Nia and Emlyn, Emlyn and his father—and the mystery of what went on at the chapel that carries the story, rather than the first book’s moments of magical wonder. And when the fantasy does come in, it’s more mysterious and subtly threatening than in the first book. There’s no longer the possibility that the white world which took Gwyn’s sister might be an interesting place to visit, it’s much more clearly a place that people are taken to, but don’t come back from, and (unlike with the first book’s Bethan, who disappeared for seemingly no reason) it’s people who are emotionally vulnerable and isolated who are at risk of being taken. There are glimpses of adult mental illness and levels of distress you wouldn’t normally find in a book for, say, a nine-year-old readership, as in this, of Idris Llewelyn:

To Nia’s horror, the painter laughed. It was not a happy sound. On his face Nia saw a loss that was too unbearable to speak of.

And the odd creepy moment, too:

But up on the bridge something moved, pale yellow in the deadening glare of the street lights, but probably white. Small creatures crossing the bridge: children, no bigger than herself, for the stones of the bridge wall came shoulder high.

The fantastic element in Emlyn’s Moon—the presence of the fairy-like, child-like beings who take people away—is really just a heightening of an element already present in the realistic part of the story: the way people become lost to the communal human world through emotional isolation. Nia is lightly isolated by her “uselessness”, and then by her being drawn into friendship with Emlyn (which has been forbidden by her parents, because of that mysterious “something happened up there”), which even leads to her declaring herself a vegetarian (when her father has just started up a new life as a butcher); Emlyn is more deeply isolated by the split between his parents, his feeling that people think he should have gone with his mother, and his not knowing where his mother is; and his father Idris is isolated by his obsession with his art, which leads him to neglect his dwindling family. And the hint that Emlyn’s mother Elinor has gone to “the moon” implies she’s been taken to that white land, with its silvery-lunar landscape, but when she’s found, and the mystery of the “something that happened” in the chapel is revealed, it’s equally mundane. But as hers is the most extreme isolation, tinged with mental illness, she is the one the fairy-folk come for when they do come.

Emlyn’s Moon is also a novel about art, and though Idris Llewelyn’s absorption in his art is an isolating factor, when Nia’s collage is finally revealed (and surely it’s no spoiler to say that when it’s revealed, it’s a marvellous success, and she’s finally accepted as more than “useless”) art becomes a means of connection, and of escaping the trap of isolation.

With its mostly more realistic story that chimes in so well with the fantasy elements, I think I enjoyed Emlyn’s Moon more than The Snow Spider, and it certainly makes me intrigued to see how the series might be resolved in the final book, The Chestnut Soldier.

Like The Snow Spider, Emlyn’s Moon was adapted for TV, this time in five episodes, running from 6 September to 4 October 1990. Again, it was pretty faithful to the book, though whether the final supernatural events made any more sense on the screen than on the page, I don’t know.

A year or so after the Cronenberg film of Crash came out, I went into a branch of Waterstones and bought Ballard’s latest paperback, Cocaine Nights. The man behind the counter asked, with a somewhat puzzled air, what I’d made of Crash, which led me to feel I was going to have to justify this suddenly re-controversialised novel. Unused to unexpected conversations as I am, and certainly on difficult subjects, I had no idea what to say. Now, a little less than thirty years later, I thought (in l’esprit d’un très long escalier) I’d give it a go.

Crash the novel has its origins in “Crash!” the story that formed part of Ballard’s collection of condensed novels, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). Written in 1968, “Crash!” takes the form of the sort of scientific report that Vaughan, the obsessive character from the novel, would have either written himself, or would have had a supply of xeroxed copies of, to hand out to prospective co-obsessives. It led to an April 1970 exhibition of crashed cars that Ballard arranged at the New Arts Lab, a gallery and former pharmaceutical warehouse in London whose proper name, as if this wasn’t all Ballardian/Cronenbergian enough, was the Institute for Research in Art and Technology. After that, in 1971, BBC2 broadcast a short film also called “Crash!” (at 8:30p.m. on Friday 12 February—just before the watershed), featuring Ballard driving around the sort of roads that would form the backdrop for his novel, perusing cars both new and wrecked, accompanied/haunted by a young woman played by Gabrielle Drake. (Who was best known at the time as the purple-wigged Lt. Gay Ellis in Gerry Anderson’s UFO. She was also the sister of ill-fated folk singer Nick Drake, and may have bonded a little with Ballard as she, too, was born out east—in Lahore—and lived in Burma before coming back to England as a child. She evidently made an impression, as Ballard apparently mentioned her by name in an early draft of the novel, as one of the celebrities the obsessive Vaughan was pursuing. Her name lingered in the published version as one of Vaughan’s clique.)

The novel Crash was first published in 1973, though the first draft had apparently been completed towards the end of 1970. It would become the first novel of his “urban disaster triptych”, followed by Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), and is, perhaps, his most famous novel nowadays (depending on whether Empire of the Sun is still being read)—and certainly his most infamous.

Its first-person narrator is one James Ballard (to avoid confusion, I’m going to call him James; Ballard will refer to the author). He works at a studio in Shepperton producing TV ads; his wife Catherine works for Pan Am’s foreign tours division. The couple spend their time pursuing a series of affairs, which they talk about openly: “Before my accident,” James says, “our sexual relationship was almost totally abstracted, maintained by a series of imaginary games and perversities.” They live in an apartment near Heathrow (which Ballard refers to as London Airport, as it had been known till 1966), nestled amongst a network of conjoining carriageways, flyovers, turnoffs and roundabouts. One day, James loses control of his car and collides head-on with a married couple in another vehicle, killing the man and injuring the woman, Dr Helen Remington.

Convalescing in nearby Ashton Hospital, James encounters Dr Robert Vaughan, whom he at first assumes is a medical consultant. In fact, Vaughan is—or was—“one of the first of the new-style TV scientists”, currently pursuing with fetishistic intensity an obsessive interest in car accidents. This is no detached scientific study: Vaughan (“this hoodlum scientist”, as the novel calls him), judging by the network of scars on his face and body, has been through a fair number of collisions himself—incidents he seems to actively encourage—and has utterly invested all his energies, intellectual, creative and sexual, in the notion of the car crash as some sort of ultimate meaningful experience, with the road-death of a celebrity (his current target being Elizabeth Taylor) being, for him, the ultimate of ultimates.

Vaughan has a small coterie of followers, including the permanently concussed stunt driver Seagrave, Seagrave’s equally sozzled wife Vera, and Gabrielle, a young woman left permanently disabled by a major road accident. James and Helen soon join this group, as they get drawn in by Vaughan’s domineering obsession.

Vaughan is absolutely a Ballard type, what David Pringle, in his 1979 study Earth is the Alien Planet, has described as “these regal madmen” who make up the third in a Ballardian trinity of Lamia, Jester, and King. I tend to think of the archetype of this figure as Hathaway in Ballard’s short story “The Subliminal Man”, a combined philosopher-scientist and terrorist, with all the mad, nervous energy of Dennis Hopper at the end of Apocalypse Now!, combined with the dark certainty and purpose of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz. (In a way, all of Ballard’s novels could be read as variations on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, being about a character who over-adapts to a new or changed environment.)

Here, though, Vaughan starts to show a somewhat different side. Hathaway in “The Subliminal Man” is eloquent about his obsession (the dominating effect of subliminal advertising on modern city-dwellers), but Vaughan, as far as I recall, never justifies or explains his fixation on the car crash. He convinces not with words, but the magnetism of his own obsession. In fact, as the novel progresses, Vaughan speaks less and less, until soon he communicates entirely through his presence and the actions he takes. Combined with his increasingly dishevelled appearance (his stained clothes, multiple minor injuries, and the fact that he basically lives in his beat-up car), he starts to feel less like a “hoodlum scientist” and more like some half-starved feral child forced to come up with his own highly individual response to what can only have been a traumatic entry into adolescence. Described as “a strange mixture of personal hauntedness, complete confinement in his own panicky universe, and yet at the same time open to all kinds of experiences from the outer world”, he feels, in fact, rather like the young Jim of Empire of the Sun, but with a (troubled, and fatally warped) adult sexuality. And swapping occupied 1940s Shanghai for the roads, car parks, and hospitals around 1970s Heathrow has made no difference: both, in the eyes of these Ballardian characters, are post-traumatic landscapes, heading towards some transcendent apocalypse indistinguishable from death. (Jim in Empire of the Sun is ultimately freed from the Japanese POW camps by the dropping of the atom bomb; this novel’s hinted “autogeddon” blurs woozily between a world-wide motorway pile-up and some sort of LSD-fuelled ascension into the skies.)

(There’s an element of Ballard’s best friend, the real-life TV scientist Christopher Evans, in Vaughan, as Ballard writes in Miracles of Life: “In appearance he resembled Vaughan, the auto-destructive hero of my novel Crash, though he himself was nothing like that deranged figure.” At one point, Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars was going to be more of a performance, which Evans was going to narrate—somewhat as Vaughan does in the novel. As well as being a prophet of the microcomputer revolution—in the late 1970s he predicted our lives would be transformed by wristwatch communicators—Evans was also the scientific advisor for The Tomorrow People.)

To me, Crash makes best sense when viewed as an essential next step in the overall movement of Ballard’s oeuvre at the time, a deepening exploration of the theme of modern-life-as-post-traumatic-daze, initially put forward in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard at that time pointed out that his fiction was often about isolated individuals, and the car is a particularly potent symbol of modern isolation. People shield themselves in the steel and fibre-glass shells of their vehicles, insulating themselves from the thousands of others they pass on roads and motorways as they head about their daily lives. (Early on, James uses his car’s safety features as a form of distancing from the secretary he’s been having an affair with: “the safety belt I had deliberately fastened to save her the embarrassment of embracing me”.) Within such isolating units, specifically designed to encase and protect, the only way for people to interact as warm, living beings is through collisions violent enough to crack these all-enclosing carapaces. The alternative is to invite someone into your car, but in Crash, at least, driving together is only done in search of sex or car crashes, or some combination of both.

There’s a feeling, in the novel, of modern life being so divorced from authentic experience that it’s only in the extremes—the car crash—that the characters reawaken to what it means to be alive. James’s head-on collision becomes “the only real experience I had been through for years”, which to me recalls Bessel van der Kolk on the suddenly reduced range of meaningful experience suffered in PTSD:

“Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.”

Another van der Kolk quote—“traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them”—feels like it comes through in Ballard’s novel in the moments immediately after James’s crash: “the narrow angle between the bonnet and fenders seemed to my exhausted mind to be repeated in everything around me”, as though the world had shattered into a million fragments of reflective glass.

Vaughan, James, Helen and the others have all had their range of meaningful experience reduced to the ultra-narrow window of the car crash and nothing but the car crash, into which they funnel the entirety of their emotional and physical energies. Squeezed as they are by such a tiny aperture, everything becomes an undistinguished super-heated jumble (“hostility and affection, emotions which had become interchangeable”) instantly drained of all meaning (encounters between human beings—sexual or violent—become “conceptualised acts abstracted from all feeling”).

In Earth is the Alien Planet, David Pringle identifies two of Ballard’s key themes as imprisonment and flight, and, in a way, the car is the perfect combination of the two. Cars are (like Hawkwind’s “Orgone Accumulator”) social isolators, moveable protective boxes, but their speed and smooth movement gives them a hopeful hint of dream-like flight. And towards the end of the novel, James has visions of the many automobiles around London Airport yearning to take to the skies from the flyovers and feeder roads, as though the novel were about to move into some Unlimited Dream Company-style transformation of magical flight.

For me, the essence of Crash isn’t in its story, but its prose, which is absolutely where its roots in Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition-era fiction show. Encounters between characters are described with a remorseless medical precision, with sex scenes reading more like instructions for assembling some particularly challenging piece of flat-pack furniture, and Ballard’s well-bred dialogue is never used to better (affectless) effect, as it leaches the emotion from all human exchanges. Nevertheless, there are moments of pure Ballardian poetry, as in this transcendent description of a traffic jam:

“The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.”

It’s for this reason I find it so difficult to process David Cronenberg’s film version of Crash, which came out in 1996. There are only hints of the filmic equivalent (obsessive close-ups of car parts) of Ballard’s prose. And as soon as you put Ballard’s dialogue into the mouths of good actors, they can’t help but add more emotion than it should have. (Which is perhaps why James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger, as James Ballard and his wife Catherine, speak so quietly, as though to deaden as much of their humanity as they can. It doesn’t quite work, for me. The adaptation needs crash test dummies, not actors.) The characters who do work, in the film, are the ones who were most defined in the novel by their physical presence: Vaughan, and the disabled Gabrielle (whose mix of human flesh and straps, supports and buckles pushes her the most into Cronenbergian “new flesh” territory).

I’m sure the film works better when viewed purely as part of Cronenberg’s oeuvre, though I see it too much as an adjunct to Ballard’s to do that. (Perhaps a run-up of other Cronenberg films might help.) I have no idea how people who are into neither Ballard nor Cronenberg processed the film, though that may be demonstrated by the controversy around its release back in 1996. (Neither the novel nor the film are as extreme as earlier works from these two creators.)

I don’t know if Crash is the first novel to read if you’re thinking of getting into Ballard’s writings, but perhaps that’s just because I approached it by way of the early environmental disaster novels and short stories. Who knows, an in-at-the-deep-end approach (to this drained concrete swimming pool) might produce different results.