Cocaine Nights

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G. would cock his eyebrow at, but would shake his head in doubting wonderment as he poured himself another few fingers of bourbon. Police exclusion tapes looped along its rails, falling into the water where they drifted like streamers from a forgotten party. It’s everything else, but especially his portrait of boredom and impunity among the rich and privileged. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard's works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Neil Gaiman, Zadie Smith, John Lanchester and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs. They are people who achieved what their consider to be the highest possible goal: build paradise on Earth.

that she becomes homicidal, and Cocaine Nights (1996) centres on an island community whose cultured lifestyle is supported by crime. Upon arriving and talking with his sibling, Charles finds to his horror that his brother has confessed to everything, and has no interest in trying to escape his plea. Like Super-Cannes that followed it, it deals with the idea of dystopian resort communities which maintain their seemingly perfect balance via a number of dark secrets.I have books where you can’t see the title or the author’s name until you open the cover) and the premise of the story were enough to attract me to this novel. The Drowned World describes an apocalyptic society, with a hero that ushers in the destruction of the world.

Novels such as Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise portray a society that is devolving into barbaric chaos. It seems these folk want nothing more than to stay in the dark like vampires and watch TV in-between the daytime napping. He discovers that, far from shattering the peace of a dead-eyed expat community, the fire was part of a crime wave carried out by the occupants of Estrella de Mar for their own entertainment. Because it appears to be, from both the cover and the synopsis, a noir novel at heart, which I thoroughly enjoy. In part because it was recently the work book club choice (although I'm not actually a member) Cocaine Nights was the first one out of the pile.The terrifying thing about Ballard is his logic; is this science fiction or history written ahead of its time?

Charles is stunned when Frank’s lawyer tells him Frank is definitely going to please guilty to all five counts of murder.

I wonder what I would have made of Cocaine Nights if it had been the first of Ballard's novels I had read. Ballard, the surrealistic poet of contemporary life, looks into the near future in this collection of unsettling short stories.

And the setting, so it turns out, is not the ’70s, but the ’90s, so it doesn’t really have anything to do with the intriguing, chilling debauchery of the disco culture of the ’70s.But party by accident he was involved in some petty crimes and observed that it pepped the victims up no end. Now, drawing on the beguiling storytelling skills behind compelling novels like Empire of the Sun and Rushing to Paradise, and the imagination that produced such startlingly original works as The Crystal World, Crash and High-Rise, he has created Cocaine Nights – at once an engrossing mystery and an unnerving vision of a society coming to terms with a life of unlimited leisure. The frankness of her erotic response, the unashamed way in which she used her sex, seemed to unsettle Crawford. The thesis is that society is sinking into a profound slump of boredom and accidie, addicted to TV while its mind vegetates.