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.

Kingdom Come is narrated by Richard Pearson, a former advertising executive who leaves his home in central London and drives out to Brooklands, a dormitory town in the M25 corridor, in the hopes of investigating the circumstances of his elderly father's death. Richard's father was shot – apparently by a