Running Wild

by J. G. Ballard

Overview

Yet again J. G. Ballard’s inimitable clairvoyance is on display in this timely, powerful story of a community shattered by a massive act of violence.

A massacre rocks a suburban utopia—thirty-two adults murdered, and their children missing—in Running Wild, one of Ballard’s most dazzlingly subversive works of fiction. “To Ballard, lack of choice . . . is a dangerous state of being. In Running Wild, it’s not the children who are doing the running; it is the society that raised them” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631493485
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/03/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and lived in England from 1946 until his death in London in 2009. He is the author of nineteen novels, including Empire of the Sun, The Drought, and Crash, with many of them made into major films.

What People are Saying About This

Luc Sante

Ballard is a poet, an abrasive satirist of the late-twentieth-century spectacle.
—(Luc Sante)

Anthony Burgess

Ballard is among the finest writers of fiction.
—(Anthony Burgess)

Editorial Reviews

Thirty miles outside of London lies a suburban utopia called Pangbourne Village, an exclusive residential development in which all the houses are new, the security system is impeccable, parents are happy and children are provided with a nonstop roster of structured activity. But fans of Ballard's High Rise , in which he turned an apartment tower into a warring miniature city, will recognize his dim view of fabricated societies. Indeed, in his eerie new novella's first moments, Pangbourne's 32 adults are found murdered, and the complex's 13 children, all but one of them teenagers, have vanished. Written as a police psychiatrist's forensic diary, the story unfolds as an investigation that quickly points to the children themselves as culprits. Though the author sketches a sharp portrait of complacent privilege in Thatcher's England and tells a provocative story with a jolting final twist, the explanation of a carefully coordinated plot among the youths--``in a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom''--is unduly glib. At just over 100 pages, that's really all there is to it; this is, in every sense, a minor work by a major writer. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly