Rating: 
Summary: Avoid the ReSearch edition!
Review: I generally appreciate ReSearch, their guide to J.G. Ballard
is a fine volume, and JGB himself participated in the
ReSearch version, but as a longtime Ballard reader I must
say that those who really want to get at
"The Atrocity Exhibition" should definitely find another
version. What ReSearch has produced is a coffeetable book for
the doom generation, full of tritely "ballardian" visual
imagery. Furthermore, the editorial introduction brags that
Ballard's commentary "deconstructs" the novel. If there ever
were a novel NOT in need of "deconstructing" it is The Atrocity
Exhibition. Ballard is always very generous about the many
lame co-optations of his work, whether it be Spielberg's movie
or Cronenberg's movie or this mess, all of which have his
praise and support (which after years of public incomprehension
and hostility is understandable), but that doesn't mean you
are getting the real thing when you visit these collaborative calamities. Read the man himself, in plain text.
Rating: 
Summary: A fiber of string weaved into conscienceness
Review: I innocently happened upon this book from my enjoyment of the Re/Search publications, and found myself very much changed by this treasure of literature. For me,"The Atrocity Exhibition" started off as just a story to pass the time at first, full of interesting, mysterious characters, wrapped in a murky sea of polluted thoughts and perversion. But as my urge to alleviate bordem developed into an overwhelming curiosity, I found myself seeing something of a pattern to the prose, the characters, and myself. Suddenly I found myself seeing a wonderfull tragic flow, that was not a falling of a crippled society, but an almost invisible shifting of consciousness that has been going on, and continues to change the way our thought patterns, sexuality, and our organic structures, manipulate and coarse through existence. It is like my mind was and has always been growing a genitalia which use is without bounds. So in other words, I thought the book was really neat, full of subtle, respectfull commentary on our ever changing world.
Rating:
Summary: For Fans Only
Review: I read this while on vacation, and can honestly say, it was the most bizzare thing I have ever read. Personally, I loved it. As a Ballard fan, especially of his early works (Voices of Time, Terminal Beach, etc) I can say this was truly a fascinating read. However, I would recommend non Ballard fans to look elsewhere for an introduction to his work.
Rating:
Summary: For Fans Only
Review: I read this while on vacation, and can honestly say, it was the most bizzare thing I have ever read. Personally, I loved it. As a Ballard fan, especially of his early works (Voices of Time, Terminal Beach, etc) I can say this was truly a fascinating read. However, I would recommend non Ballard fans to look elsewhere for an introduction to his work.
Rating:
Summary: It took me years to crack this book's code & it's worth it!
Review: I was extremely excited to look up "Horror" here & find not some Koontz or Saul or Rice travesty recommended by readers, but ATROCITY EXHIBITON. A very difficult work. Some experimental, avant-garde stuff just irritates me, but the reason I kept at Ballard was because I believed him. I had to crack it open. Break it. Made me bleed a little. Your mind starts to fill in narrative gaps in the disjointed structure that are more disturbing than anything Ballard could come up with. The cool, clinical, obsessive prose and particularly the idead of "a technology of pornography" I found especially enticing. Be on the lookout for his great short "The Terminal Beach"--Traven/Travis appears there too. I don't want every book to be like this, but in a world of Anne Tylers and Mary Higgins Clarks and even (god forbid I take his name in vain!) Charles Frazier it's good to know this stuff is being read and appreciated. My friends think I'm crazy and pretentious for liking it--but I really do!
Rating: 
Summary: Total disappointment
Review: I was really looking forward to reading this book because it was highly recommended and rated...what can I say? I couldn't believe what kind of nonesense it was when I started with it...someone mentioned here that this is a cult book that wouldn't be recommended to 99 percent of readers, well I guess I am one of this 99 percentile. The only time I could slightly enjoy reading it was when I was stoned and I could get some sense out of it...but since I am mostly sober all the time then this book is definitely not for me!
Rating:
Summary: The illustrated ReSearch edition is a must have.
Review: I will not repeat what others have written as all the praise is indeed justified for this classic. I would like to add that the illustrated edition by ReSearch is the edition to have (I am not sure if this is the one that is currently available from Amazon). Phoebe Gloeckner's work and the B&W photographic collages really add tremendously to the already powerful words of J.G. Ballard.
Rating:
Summary: Horror Autotoxicus, or: "To the Insane"
Review: I've always thought of *The Atrocity Exhibition* as a sort of studio transcript to the notorious Mutter Facility at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia (a grand guignol medical museum ensconced with wax models and formaldehyde exhibits, a physiognomical gallery of God's practical jokes), proving once and for all that when Beauty and its opposite coalesce into body-horror deformity, socially conditioned thinking is shattered. But Ballard goes even further, taking the Atomic and Space Age to task for its traumas, its reverberations, its scorched optics -- applying his scalpel-sharp poetic to the pathogenic aftershock of Nagasaki and an era of technological upheaval. (It is almost impossible to summarize *TAE* without tailspinning into postmodern cliches.) As Julia Kristeva once wrote, "SHOW ME what I permanently thrust aside in order to live." Ballard's book argues that no kinaesthetic language has yet been conceived to map the schizoid traceries of sexuality and the media landscape. Hence, *The Atrocity Exhibition* may be the authentic prolegomenon for all you postmodern yahoos out there trying to one-up the academic nosebleed-theory of Deleuze-Guatarri and their rabble of exegetes.(!) The book opens in a converted gymnasium at an exhibition of paintings produced by schizophrenics, an event to which the patients themselves are not invited. If Ballard's irony rings true, then the reader of *TAE* is the real, underlying patient, a "doublethinking" innocent in the scan-lines of the psychiatric machine, a test subject weighted-down by the collective anguish of the 20th century. (In essence, Ballard compels us to expand our awareness to a hundred things, so that our pain will be only a hundredth of our awareness.) From the weapons ranges of New Mexico to the space-age bunkers of the Nazi Atlantic Wall, to the mysterious and potent relics of a post-despair media landscape, to the cubicle purgatory of the knowledge-worker's carpal tunnel syndrome, to the cosmetic wounds of vehicular manslaughter and the death of love, Ballard traverses the nodal points, the seeing places, the cult sanctuaries of global neurosis. His original dedication: "To the Insane." *The Atrocity Exhibition* is a bitter pill, at times grindingly dull. But patient readers can't escape the feeling that they are taking part in some painful and reprehensible conspiracy, a psychological voyage through the air-conditioned nightmare of zero time. While some argue that Ballard never really understood the true currents behind technology's prosthetic will-to-power, instead substituting an introverted array of cryptic tableaux, wistful post-Bomb residuals, and obsessive-compulsive urban simulacra, no one can deny his iconic repertoire of moods and lunatic juxtapositions, a world of dark-adapted souls wandering the derelict edge-communities of Cape Canaveral and Los Alamos, a grounded astronaut in the corridors of sleep, a mythic film-actress floating in formaldehyde, a mental patient unhinged by spinal landscapes of history's time warp. Ballard is merciless in his nonsense correspondences and pretentious techno-rhetoric, but every few paragraphs he gets it just right, sees truly into the wilted heart of an aerial creature navigating the dusky precincts of what we can peremptorily call the Postapocalyptic, beyond origins and ends, energies and passions crystalled by a cutting-edge (in 1968 anyway) literary sensibility. The book encapsulates everything that's "good" and everything that's "bad" about that appalling shibboleth, Postmodern [Aesth]et(h)ics. As such, it has achieved textbook-status amongst those who wish to write *real* science-fiction this late in history, or ambitious readers who want to formulate their own private aesthetic of what "speculative fiction" can and should be. The five-star rating is pure hubris on my part. I wouldn't recommend this novel to 99% of a literary public weaned on Toni Morrison or the watered-down aesthetics of someone like Helen Vendler. Yet for those slogging in and around the edge-culture of spiritual ennui and postmodern stupefaction, trying to squeeze that last bit of irony out of our blasted, disaffected industrial landscapes, *The Atrocity Exhibition* may be the soul-bomb for you. Only by marching straight into the purgatories of media pathology and urban disaffection can a program of mental health be formulated, only by understanding the historical underpinnings of postmodern malaise can the culture-shocked reader begin trawling for alternatives. Returning to the Mutter museum, the uber-FAQ amongst visitors to the facility seems to be "Is it real?" -- or, more profoundly, "Is that ME?" While readers of *The Atrocity Exhibition* and *Crash* tend to the more vulgar "What is this garbage?" and "Are you friggen kidding me?" One can be forgiven for asking either set of questions, I suppose. Ballard's work still dominates our compulsive desire for self-discovery when the Self has been displaced into spinal levels of media bandwidth, where "highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as...elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system"(44). To the Insane. Vulgar? Perhaps. Trite? In a sense. Obscurantist? At times. Essential reading? Absolutely.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Ballardesque Stuff
Review: If you want to have an inkling to what literature would look in the 21st century if it weren't for the advent of the so-called "information highways", this would be it. Inner and Outer space mixed into one. The inside of a deranged man's mind exposed, analysed and blown-up into flying images that cloud "his" sky. The walls of a room and the curves of a woman viewed as mathematical equations. Brilliant. This edition with the author's comments on the side makes a lot of the text both more accessible and more entertaining. The illustrations and the photographs add "mood" to the whole experience.
Rating:
Summary: Ballard's best - sex, psychopathology and sacred geometry!
Review: Interest in Ballard's work is sure to be stirred by the controversial film of his novel, "Crash." "The Atrocity Exhibition" shares many of the same characters and themes. In fact, of the two works, "Atrocity Exhibition" is the better: it pushes the artistic conventions of fiction to the limits to explore the degenerating mental landscape of the protagonist. Against a nightmarish postmodern background of unethical psychological experiments gone awry and obsession with media icons, even questions of simple identity become impossible to unravel. Travis/Travers/Traven/Talbot is pushed to madness and perhaps even murder - one character seems to die in four seperate scenes! - by his co-workers, fellow psychiatrists at a teaching hospital. Modern architecture becomes confused with perverted sexuality as the protagonist projects his fantasies of Elizabeth Taylor onto high rise apartment buildings. This edition is a gem. It contains four additional Ballard stories, a preface by William S. Burroughs, and deranged illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner who juxtaposes her world- renowned medical illustrations with images of disturbing eroticism and mechanization. Provocative, exhilarating and terrifying, Ballard sucks the reader into the psychosis of his characters. This work is Ballard's literary masterpiece. After reading it, the world seems a much scarier place.
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