Running Wild

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Summary: Running Wild Review
Review: Although this book is short, it still has a great story that's haunting and very disturbing. Just from what's on the back you get an idea about what happens, yet as Ballard explains it, it doesn't matter WHAT happened it matters WHY it happened. This book also acts as a chilling prophecy of how western society will become. I read this after I read "Crash", by Ballard, but both books are very different and it's hard to believe that they're both by the same author. It won't take long to read, but it'll be something you'll remember.

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Summary: The key to his later works.
Review: This book is where you should start off to understand Ballard's later fiction (CRASH, ATROCITY EXHIBITION, HIGH RISE, or anything after the early 1970's). This novella reveals Ballards signature pessimism and facination for the technological landscape: its inherent role in the systematization and categorizing of human behaviour. In RUNNING WILD, Ballard shows the devastating effect when our primal urges rears its ugly head after buried for too long. The novella is set in a self-contained living complex (much like HIGH RISE) where tragedy is struck. Like Freud, Ballard accepts the tragic, barbaric reality of humankind and continually asserts (which he does in his latest, COCAINE NIGHTS) that the primal nature of man will subvert, or altogether revolt against any "civilized" attempt to change it. This novel is depressing and revealing. Read it. It won't take long to finish it and it also won't be long before you become a Ballard fanatic.

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Summary: Perfect introduction to Ballard
Review: This short, clinical, unflinching novella about the violent end of a gated community is a perfect introduction to the priceless talents of J. G. Ballard. Adopting the persona of a forensic psychiatrist investigating the mass murder of the occupants of a London residential estate, Ballard explores the dangers inherent in even the most privileged manifestations of social control - the fabricated society is an attempt to lock danger out, but its regime of repression is more likely to lock danger in. You'll solve the mystery of what happened in Pangbourne Village within the first ten pages, but that isn't the point. It's not whodunit that matters, but why. Ballard's epigrammatic summary, when it comes, is slightly trite and hardly does justice to what's come before it: a chilling work of distilled intensity. It isn't the best exploration of Ballard's searing sociological vision, but it's a delicious appetizer. Readers who enjoy this will probably find "High Rise" to their taste, too.