J G Ballard is the undisputed laureate of suburban psychosis. He has achieved this, as many have pointed out, by writing a long run of novels that have been very nearly exactly the same: the working-out – in his unique, and uniquely weird, idiom – of a series of preoccupations bordering on the monomaniacal. There was the one about the blandly luxurious gated community where, under the surface, all was madness and murder. Then there was the other one about the blandly luxurious gated community where, under the surface, all was madness and murder. Then there was the other one… and so on.

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