synopsis:

This book resembles a flickering video-collage in written form. We enter the schizophrenic psyche of the main character whose name changes (Travis, Travers, Traven, Talbot) mirror the increasing fragmentation of his external environment - a backdrop of splintered mass-cultural icons.

on this book:

As Ballard commented, '[this book's] landscape is compounded of an enormous number of fictions, the fragments of the dream machine that produces our lifestyle right now. I mean fictions like TV, radio, politics, the press and advertising. Life is an enormous novel. Today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, the main task of the arts seems to be more and more to isolate the real elements in this goulash of fictions from the unreal ones.''atrocity exhibition' is also the title of a song by joy division (see a design for life [phrases]) on their 1980 album closer.