synopsis:

James and Catherine Ballard are a married couple whose sex life has been reduced to recounting tales of mutual infidelity to turn each other on. One night, James causes a head-on collision with a car carrying Dr. Helen Remington, killing her husband and severely injuring her and himself. The two find that they were both sexually aroused by the crash, and, with Catherine, soon fall in with a cult of car crash fetishists. The group is led by Vaughan, a former scientist twisted by his own disfigurement in a car crash, and, as a result, a man obsessed with car crashes as a liberation of sexual energy.

Vaughan inducts the Ballards and Dr. Remington into his surreal world of re-enactments of famous car crashes (i.e. James Dean and Jayne Mansfield), screenings of collision videos as pornography, and sex at and around accident scenes.

on this book:

Crash is an incredibly strange book. its controversial, graphic, but it's not as disturbing as some might think. Ballards writing style takes time to get used to. There is very little talking among the characters; most of the story is in the vivid descriptions and elaborate detail. The story has an incredibly amount of detail when it comes to describing the crashes and the sexual fascination that revolves around them.what makes this book worth reading isn't necessarily its plot or characters, as the plot is not incredibly cohesive and the characters are not in any way dynamic. more important is the subject matter, detail and ideas implied. There is much description of the implied sexual elements of vehicle collision and after-effects of it - much detail is paid to the wounds crash victims suffer, probably more than anything else. However, from the first line it is apparent that a principle character died trying to stage a crash.crash was adapted on film in 1996 by david cronenberg.see also: * "I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit..."