Review from a Transgressive Fiction Fan
J.G. Ballard’s late period where his thematic concerns were filtered through the crime genre. Cocaine Nights is a subversive mystery, where the plot matters less than the prose. Where the characters mean little, and the ideas mean everything. It is Ballard at his most accessible, but with his rectangular, clinical prose intact. It is not a book that will convince the unconvinced that Ballard is the most important post-War British writer, but for those who love Ballard it is just another glimpse of that lightning brilliance. Entropic drift. Empty swimming pool. Messianic tennis coaches. Disillusioned psychiatrists. Brutalist architecture, and sex. None more Ballardian.
“Insightful” Review from a Mainstream Reader
The sheer existence of such a publication proves that 1) If there is a God, She is a cruel sadist who makes readers pick up books with funky titles on the weight of the sheer hype of the author and that the book had been actually shortlisted for numerous prizes, before bludgeoning them (the reader) with the most ridiculous plots, the most cliché phrases, the most flat and/or plagiarized characters, and the worst command of the English language coupled with scaling-walls-with-fingernails-awful writing; and 2) That once you’ve made yourself a name, somehow, the editors don’t read your text, don’t even pass it through a proofreader, but print it off right away and support it with hype-advertisment. If ever there is one single writer in print that is worse than J.G. Ballard, I would be interested in seeing what THAT could possibly read like!
What a waste of perfectly good vomit…