Mass-market Monday | J.G. Ballard’s Crash

Crash, J.G. Ballard. Vintage Books, first Vintage Books edition (1985). Cover design by Carin Goldberg with art by Chris Moore. 224 pages.

A few sentences and fragments from The New York Time’s original 1973 review of Crash:

…hands-down, the most repulsive book I’ve yet to come across.

….as reader, I promise you, only a virtuoso foulness can turn my stomach.

…a crazed, morbid roundelay of dismemberment and sexual perversion.

…I could not, in conscience, recommend it. Indeed I most cordially advise against.

…monomaniacal drive.

…The protagonists are titillated by collisions as dogs are by curb smells.

…Punched out eyeballs. Blood. Vomit. Fecal matter. Decapitation. Sperm. Bifurcated, mashed genitals.

…Perhaps J.G. Ballard was traumatized at a drive-in theater.

…I certainly won’t read further in the Ballard oeuvre.