Sam Leith

Walking Into Nightmare

Kingdom Come

By

Fourth Estate 280pp £17.99 order from our bookshop

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.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • RT : Founded in 1979, is a trusted independent source for reviews of new books across a variety of genres. A… ,
    • RT : Here we are - "Shelf Indulgence" by Ed Potten, a wonderful read, well worth your time: @Lit_Review,
    • 'Like going to a party hoping to get away as quickly as politeness allowed and at 4am finding myself still engrosse… ,
    • 'Neville never shed his sense of being the junior, and perhaps least-deserving Chamberlain.' From the archive, Mic… ,
    • 'The erecting and immediate destruction of a series of straw men rather detracts from what is for the most part an… ,
    • RT : A magnificent demolition job on this "acid laced tirade...unpleasantly self-obsessed...self pitying polemic...book… ,
    • 'Seventy years on, the time we have left to gather such first-hand testimony is running out.' John Keay on the sig… ,
    Follow Us