ed.rybicki
4/7/2015
I think I am too young for JG Ballard - still, 40 years and more after I first encountered him. I vividly rmember this collection: have you EVER hear of a weirder title for a story than "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race"?
Have you? OK, maybe "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Tick-Tock Man", but Ellison has always gone for splashy shock/horror.
Ballard has a spare, dry, dispassionate style and an imagination that is frankly disturbing - and the combination gives you stories that read easily, and live with you forever, while giving you a creepy-crawly feeling at the back of your head. I still cannot forget my first reading of my first Ballard story, because it disturbed me so much: a strange mandala in a desert place; a broken child in a crash helmet....
These are his freakiest stories: books like Terminal Beach, The Drowned World and the like are very different; it is in the short form that he found his true niche.
Other than being semi-autobiographical, but that is another story.
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