Crash is J. G. Ballard's landmark novel published in 1973. In it, he looks at our worship of technology through the sexual fetishisation of cars. He does this brutally and without flinching, combining sexual fetish with death and injury in car accidents.
The result is to uncover some harsh truths about ourselves and our deep psychology and to get at the often absurd and destructive meanings in our society. It famously led one reader at his publisher to note "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!"
I'm going to push out a post after every chapter. There's 24 chapters. This is the intro so lets start at the beginning:
Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan's body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.The narrator, a fictionalized version of the author called James Ballard is going to recount his friendship with Vaughan, whose ultimate fantasy was to die in a head on car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. See you after chapter one.