DivineDemento

J.G Ballard’s infamous cult novel Crash shocked and dismayed many readers upon release. It depicts a world where the barriers between sex, cruelty and technology have been broken down, as a group of traumatised fanatics explore the latent sexual potential of the car Crash. In 1973, this assessment of the modern word seemed impossibly bleak. Now, in 2019, the inextricable link between sex and machinery has become a worrying reality. Introduction - 'A Brutal, Erotic Novel' ‘This author is beyond psychiatric help – do not publish!’ This infamous line, quoted in maybe every article written about Crash, is apparently the reaction from a publisher’s wife upon reading her husband’s edition of J.G Ballard’s definitive post-modern novel. As hysterical as this reaction may seem, it was indicative of the novel’s reception at the time. Crash is a wilfully challenging book – mixing graphic descriptions of car-crash sustained injuries with equally graphic sex scenes, all if which ...