Crash

The narrator, who shares his name with the author, J. G. Ballard, drives his car into another vehicle and watches the other driver die in front of him. The collision does not leave him. He is drawn, with growing intensity, to the wreckage of car accidents and to what they do to bodies.

His fixation leads him to Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist who now haunts the expressway. Vaughan has collected a circle of alienated crash survivors around him and stages a series of autoerotic experiments, each more sinister than the one before.

Vaughan wants one final collision. In his mind it joins blood, semen, engine coolant and the image of a famous celebrity in a single head-on impact. The book follows the narrator as he gets closer to that plan.

The novel is a postmodern work built on violence, transgression and eroticism, and it is explicit and disturbing by design. First published in 1973, it has since become a cult text. This edition carries a new introduction by Zadie Smith, and David Cronenberg made it into a controversial film.