Rating: 
Summary: Sex violence and broken glass
Review: This is a really intruiging book. Its written in a detailed, deadpan style that is both emotionally cool and very stylish, and explores connections between sex, technology and death. At points it reads a little like a clinical dissertation on road trauma but is none the less absorbing because of it. The book also contains interesting information about the fatal road crashes of celebrities such as Dean, Mansfield and Camus. The story revolves around people for whom car crashes, and the psychological and physical immersion in them, provides increasingly intense sexual pleasure. I really enjoyed this book, and as an aside, felt that the movie by Cronenberg accurately conveyed the sense of chillingly kinky, sexually violent exploration articulated in the novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Well, wasn't that disturbing!
Review: That was the most disturbing book I have ever read. It makes A Clockwork Orange look like a bedtime story. I must admit that I found parts of it to be difficult to stomach at first. As you get further into the book, you realize that you are in the minds of very sick, obssessive individuals. Therefore the prose is meant to shock. This book was written incredibly well. It is thought provoking and far ahead of it's time. The main theme of our increasing difficulty in relating to other people without the use of our expanding technology is still very much an issue today. It also forces you to look at obssession and the way that it twists every thought that a person might have. While Ballard takes this to a bizarre extreme, it applies to our most common little daily obssessions. The only problem with this book is it's lack of plot and dialogue. If you are a reader that loves to get into a story and it's charecters, and can't wait to see how it all ends, this book is not for you. I could not care less about what happened to the sick freaks in this book. If you can take art, just for arts sake, than you will probably enjoy the mind trip this book will give.
Rating: 
Summary: Exceptionally well written and original
Review: I hesitated a bit before giving this book a try, as the subject matter sounded violent and disturbing. But Ballard does a brilliant job of creating a rich world of desire and eroticism, and the characters become quite real and compelling. The book was a very pleasant surprise, and I recommend to anyone to pick it up with an open mind and go along for the ride
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Summary: Perspectives on Crash
Review: A number of on-line reviewers seem mistaken -- or at least I disagree with them about -- certain key points regarding this masterful novel. First, I have read several times that Crash is the story of the dehumanization of a group of individuals who explore their sexual fetish for car crashes. This is not the book I thought I read. The world of Crash is cruelly objectified; it is a dehumanized world already -- and the background information we are given portrays Ballard and his wife as living jaded, exhausted essentially middle class existences amidst steely urban wonders that no longer fascinate them and a plethora of luxury toys that no longer entice. The narrator's relationship with his wife is habitual, like all his relationships. Their world has stolen their ability to humanly relate to one another. After the narrator's car crash, his developing obsession with the sensuality of crashes eroticizes his dead world.The narrator and the other crashers may degrade themselves, but they do it to break through the tedium of the mechanical world into something more satisfying. The story is bleak, but by the end of the novel, Ballard, his wife and friends have achieved a kind of twisted familial relationship; perverse, by ordinary standards, but more rather than less intimate than what they had before. I also can't say I am sympathetic to skeptics regarding the book's style, and am curious as to what books they regard as well-written. If Crash isn't exquisitely wrought, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, please show me the book that is. The glory of the novel is its poetry, really prose poetry. This can make for difficulty -- but the condensed language of poetry is more beautiful for its initial strangeness, and anyone who enjoys modern poetry should appreciate this book. Ballard resembles Edgar Allen Poe, another prose poet whose work exploits fantastical conceits. The language is driving, insistent, clinically complex and usually grammatical, occasionally veering off into pure surrealist invention. People who write fiction themselves should similarly appreciate how difficult a trick Ballard has "pulled off" for a novelist. The analogy at the core of Crash -- the eroticism of car crashes, the prurient interest of the technological -- is so bizarre and ingenious that the successful realization of the metaphor lifts the book above the level of cleverness and into the stratospheres. Usually stories developed from initial conceits too fantastical are precious at best. The more moon-mad and improbable the fancy, the more arduous the literary task. Ballard has not written a thin, minimalist exercise, but a full blooded novel. Richly atmospheric prose can often stop the forward progress of a plot. Crash is prose poetry and a successful novelistic entertainment, featuring plot, characterization, and action. The novel pivots around two scenes, both remarkable for their distorted beauty. The scene between Ballard's wife and the couple's friend, Vaughn, a backseat sexual encounter in a car wash, is a sadomasochistic masterpiece, vivisecting the character's emotional lives into a metaphorical landscape of auto parts. There is as much emotion in this scene as in any episode of a daytime soap opera, anxiety, jealousy, affection and fear mostly conveyed through innuendo and imagery, the pulsing of the massive car wash wipers, the sensualized window spray. In the aftermath of watching his wife being brutalized, "beaten up" as much as made love to, the couple come as close as they ever have to articulating themselves emotionally. For Ballard and the other crashers, technology is sexy because technology can kill. Before they discovered the potential eroticism of the technological world, convenience and sexual excess had rendered their lives as a whole boring and routine. By raising the stakes to preposterous levels, by the sensualizing their habitual surfaces, they become more than dummies -- sex is bodily, and now that they are putting their very bodies at risk they have found possibly their last best chance for salvation from what society has already become.The other pivotal scene is the LSD trip near the end. Let me pay Ballard a peculiar, but deserved complement. This is the only passable literary description of "tripping" that I have ever read. I would quote from the passage at length except I would rather you read the book. Think of Aldous Huxley's (in my opinion) disastrous purple prose meditation, The Doors of Perception, and you will see how masterful a writer Ballard is. Crash's LSD scene is "a trip" linguistically. The prose isn't laughably incoherent, or absurdly ecstatic. Whereas Huxley commits both the aforesaid crimes, drawing upon so many mystical analogies that they cancel each other out, Ballard achieves more with drastically fewer words. As an artist he recognizes what fiction is best at -- the distilled essence of an experience; the emotional turmoil of a divorce, not the legalistic details; the viscera of war, not the politics; of an LSD trip, the phantasmagoria. The whole book is one of the most successful analogies for hallucinatory experiences ever transcribed, comparable to the work of Baudelaire, Poe, and the Rimbaud of poems such as "Cities" and "Metropolis" This is saying quite a lot. Like Baudelaire's poems about Satan worshiping, Crash is both about a dehumanized world and, within that world, a terrible, potentially fatal search for new forms of the trancendental.
Rating:
Summary: Points for subject matter if not for execution
Review: This is a case of a derivative work being superior to the original, IMO. I came to the novel because I found the film so compelling. True, the two share a fascinating take on the relation of man and technology in their exploration of the eroticism of one of the more iconic pieces of machinery ever created: the automobile. But this isn't just doing-it-in-the-back-seat-of-the-Chevy sex, this is kinky, body-modification-by-violent-means sex. Ballard's characters are obsessed with car crashes and the way in which the human body and mind are forever altered by the experience. There is an obsession with scarring, with wounds, with broken bones and torn flesh, with body fluids and the way violent impact can force them from us. This is ground-breaking stuff, thought-provoking and troubling in ways that aren't pleasant to think about. Unfortunately, whether it's that Ballard's style isn't conducive to conveying the eroticism in any visceral way or whether the sheer length of this story works against it, the novel never really grabbed hold of my imagination. I had a sense, as I slogged through the latter half of the book, that I was reading a short story in novel's clothing. It feels padded to me, and highly repetitive. The erotic frisson of engine coolant as a kind of sexual musk lost its charm after the first dozen times it was evoked. Ballard's sexual vocabulary here is clinical in the extreme which may work in terms of distancing the reader from sex on wholly human terms, but it works too well. Held at a distance by the words he chooses, it's hard to get a feel for the implied eroticism of the subject matter. It's all too cerebral, too cold and mechanical. The machine is all, and humans might as well be made of metal, too. I give points for the chances he took, but subtract them for the unnecessarily sterile way in which he took them.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, though flawed.
Review: I decided to (finally) read this book after seeing the myriad of opinions on this site, and now it's time for me to offer my two cents.
I think that the subject matter of the novel is fascinating. The book is truly an exploration of the nature of technology and the ways in which man relates to his own ever expanding technologies and the effect they have on human existence. The sex scenes are portrayed so mechanically, so devoid of any emotion or feeling, as the characters become more and more engrossed in their explorations of the perverse and the technological and become further removed from their own humanity. The focus turns to nothing more than their organic nature, the mechanics of their forms rather than the actions of their minds or feelings. Especially interesting is the acid sequence near the end of the book where these ideas come together and culminate in such a strange, hallucinatory and mind-bending way.
The problem I had with the book, which others may not mind, laid in the execution, the art. There was no innovation in the sphere of language, and Ballard's descriptions, by the end, become incredibly monotonous. If I ever again have to read the phrase "an erotic mixture of blood, semen, and engine coolant" I may lose my mind.
Ultimately, I believe this to be a very important book, though more for the questions it raises than anything else. As technology becomes more prevalent and more human, what will happen to human beings? Do we become more machine-like? I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in these themes.
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Summary: path and pathology of the future
Review: With 1973's CRASH, I believe Ballard began a track of social examination that leads from his science fiction work of the 1960s to his current speculative fiction novels. The interaction of man and technology is one of Ballard's favorite topics, and here we see the explorations of man and the automobile. With the birth of the freeway, Ballard somehow looks forward, correctly imagining the future role of the car as surrogate partner and habitat for humanity, laboratory of pathology. Vaughn and his black Lincoln are a rolling experiment, blurring the separation of driver and vehicle. Set in London, the story seems to be unconciously channeling the American/Californian car experience, where life is what you live in your car and your house is where you store your belongings. The victim of a car accident, the titular Ballard and his wife Catherine are drawn to Vaughn and his pursuit of the perfect car wreck, trying to expand and explore their own lives in the wake of their experiences following Ballard's crash. A unique psychological exploration, made into an equally excellent movie by David Cronenberg starring Elias Koteas and James Spader, with many passages preserved intact from the original novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Crash
Review: This was easily one of the dumbest books I've ever read. It was really painful just trying to get through it. Despite what some may have you believe, the book was not terribly shocking either. Ballard seems to have the potential to be a decent writer, but has really missed the mark on this one. If you're looking for a book about a completely unlikeable charactor who masturbates over car accidents, then this is the book for you. If you're not interested in that sort of thing, but would still like something a little offbeat, try Nicholson Baker or Brett Easton Ellis.
Rating:
Summary: Don't judge a book by it's movie
Review: If you saw the movie and are even mildly interested in the concept, then I urge you to read this book. If he wrote it today what would he use instead of the car? the computer probably.
Rating:
Summary: Not for the faint of heart
Review: Holy cow, is this book INTENSE. Ballard takes a patently out-there concept--a gang of car-crash enthusiasts who derive erotic pleasure from getting maimed in accidents--and makes it vivid and compelling, if not exactly plausible. Written in tightly coiled prose reminiscent of Don DeLillo, "Crash" seems excessively repetitive with all these endless descriptions of carnal doings in smashed-up cars, but keep in mind that a book about obsessive behavior perhaps ought to be obsessive in its execution. This is a gutsy book, one that makes "Tropic of Cancer" look like Oprah Book Club material. (I found myself wondering how Ballard managed to get it published at all. I even found myself wondering how he managed to stay out of jail.) It is not for everyone, but for adventurous readers it is a memorably wild ride through the dark side of the human psyche.
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