Ballard's High-Rise

The forthcoming Ben Wheatley film of J. G. Ballard's darkly disturbing 1975 novel High-Rise is an exciting proposition. It's my favourite of his novels, so of course it could all be a horrible disappointment, but let's hope it follows in the fine tradition of Crash and Empire of the Sun. That period of apocalyptic fiction from Ballard, in the wake of his controversial 1969 collection The Atrocity Exhibition, contains not only High-Rise but the peerless Crash and Concrete Island. I've already raved on about them here.

Tom Hiddleston, the star of the film, has also read an audio book version of the novel. Here's a juicy extract.

And let's not forget that High-Rise heavily influenced one of the oddest and campest eighties Doctor Who stories, Paradise Towers...