When is it appropriate to romanticise bloodied and twisted chrome?

To bathe your imagination in images of blood and semen-drenched dashboards?

To fantasise about twitching bodies splayed across bonnets, torsos impaled on steering columns, heads smashed through windshields?

And, what’s more, actually enjoy the inherent sexuality of this shocking filth?

 No, not as you step into your *insert name/description of hotted-up vehicle here please ed*, that would make you a deranged maniac. The answer is when you’re safely between the covers of a JD Ballard novel.

Do you remember the movie ‘Crash’ that came out a few years ago and won a tidy string of awards? It was one of those too-quick-for-you-dick plots made-up of seemingly unrelated events that are eventually tied together in a finale that leaves the audience exclaiming ‘ahh, there’s no such thing as coincidence’, ‘what goes around really does come around huh’, ‘wow’, or ‘I didn’t get it. Was he supposed to be her wife?’. Well, this book has nothing whatsoever to do with that film. Kronenberg did however make Ballard’s novel into a film of the same name, and the confusion between the two films resulted in an effusion of terrified ‘movie buffs’ and, on the other side of the coin, some very bored perverts.

Fortunately, Ballard doesn’t have any of those fancy narrative-twisting tricks hiding in his trunk, rather this novel is pure imagistic depravity. He has an artist’s eye for beauty amongst filth, and the result is oh so disturbingly wrong in all the right ways. This book isn’t some predictable joyride, don’t even bother strapping yourself in, Ballard will tie you to his bumper and take a nose-dive off the nearest freeway overpass.

So what about the plot then? Well there is not a lot to it really. We learn from the outset who it is that will die in the end, and the novel is one bloody and disfigured lunge toward this inevitability. Of course it is also a thinly veiled comment on the perversity of our empty capitalist fetishisms and the overpowering nihilism that is tightening its black noose around the last vestiges of a humanity already sucked dry of any value, hope or truth.

But somehow, watching Vaughan – the degenerate hero, a miscreant of the most repulsive perversities and yet somehow instantly attractive - as he orchestrates the near death of his psychopathic ex-stuntman mate Seagrave for the viewing pleasure of a mentally unstable Ballard and his nutty but hot doctor-girlfriend, is worth selling the soul of humanity for. Framing this plot is Ballard’s obsession with the end of the world. It is coming, and we will all be annihilated in one final – you guessed it – crash, which he terms ‘Autogeddon’ (gets my vote for made-up word of the week).

Don’t attempt this one on a full stomach and then only if you’re prepared for mental and emotional assault. If you walk away from this one unscarred you’ve either been reading with your eyes closed or from the confines of a psych ward.

4.5 sexualy depraved fantasies out of 5.

Further reading: Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
Or listening: Warm Leatherette by The Normals (and covered by Grace Jones)