September 30, 2025 by A.S. Van Dorston

Favorite book #9. “I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.”

It’s appropriate that I first tackled this experimental piece of transgressive speculative fiction while in the hospital aged twenty, recovering from a lung surgery where I was fileted, cutting through a couple ribs. I had a button that I could push for a dose of morphine into my IV whenever the pain got bad, and I’d doze off every hour for a bit. The perfect setting to read Crash, in small chunks in between the narcotic haze and searing pain of having been quartered.

J.G. Ballard described the book as pornography partly to poke at the politicized baggage of the term in the context of power, dominance and exploitation. At the time, I found the visceral descriptions of characters being sexually aroused by the experience of car crashes and resulting injuries as hilarious. I don’t know how much Ballard intended it to be a dark comedy, probably he was more interested in its function as an extreme metaphor for postmodern alienation, disconnection and flesh reshaped by technology, made even more perverse by desire for and obsession with transcendence through destruction.

“This pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine, still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus, as refined as the excrement of a fairy queen, or the minuscule globes of liquid that formed beside the bubbles of her contact lenses. In this magic pool, lifting from her throat like a rare discharge of fluid from the mouth of a remote and mysterious shrine, I saw my own reflection, a mirror of blood, semen and vomit, distilled from a mouth whose contours only a few minutes before had drawn steadily against my penis.”

Seemingly a glutton for punishment in being drawn to virtually unfilmable novels, David Cronenberg tackled Crash in 1996 after having done William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1991). No one I knew liked the movie, but I was extremely pleased that mainstream audiences who were fans of The Fly (1986) were maneuvered into enduring the disturbing ordeal that was Crash. It was about as good as adaptation as one could expect, a jarring experience, much like the book. There’s been nothing like it since.