Horror: The 100 Best Books by Jones Stephen & Newman Kim

Author:Jones, Stephen & Newman, Kim [Jones, Stephen & Newman, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Collection.Anthology, Literary Criticism, Non-Fiction, Essays & Letters, Reference
ISBN: 9780786705528
Google: 6no5OQAACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Published: 1988-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Disaster is a proud tradition in fantastic literature, from H. G. Wells' Martian invasion to such modern-day bestsellers as Swan Song and War Day. The fifties and the early sixties were a particularly fertile time for disaster novels, what with new awareness of atomic bombs and ecology, producing such end-of-the-world (or end-of-humanity) classics as John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids and Richard Matheson's I am Legend. It is in this tradition that J. G. Ballard began writing his book-length fiction, culminating in his fourth novel, The Crystal World. The central disaster in Ballard's book is quite simple. Something is happening in remote tropical sections of the world. The landscape is transforming, changing from lush, humid vegetation, to cold, arid crystals. But how Ballard handles this disaster is quite atypical. Instead of fighting the disaster with non-stop action or the latest scientific marvels, his characters act almost as if the change wasn't even taking place, and in a way that is most certainly secondary to their immediate emotional concerns. Death and decay are everywhere in The Crystal World. The opening image in the book is one of rotting vegetation along black river water. The protagonist, Dr. Sanders, a specialist in leprosy, searches for a former lover who has, herself, contracted the disease. In the book's most dramatic sub-plot, two men fight violently over a woman who is dying of some wasting illness. And, moving slowly but unstoppably, is the crystalization of the jungle and the world. Ballard describes this transformed jungle as a place of great beauty -- the crystals pulse with a light of their own -- but it is a place without heat, and a place of total silence. Everything, vegetation, water, birds, animals, humans, perhaps even air, is being turned to crystal and frozen in place. Ballard sets up the universe of The Crystal World as a place of opposites, foremost among them the living/rotting jungle versus the dead/magnificent crystals. The protagonist has two loves: Suzanne, who contracts leprosy and is drawn to the crystal world, and Louise, a journalist investigating the phenomenon, who wants to return to the unaffected outside world with Sanders. But Sanders cannot resolve either of his love affairs, and all the opposites in the book seem equally unresolvable. Life goes on, for the most part passively, as the crystals approach. The only moment of true passion in the book occurs when a character, rescued by Sanders from a crystal shell and returned to bleeding, aching flesh, demands to be taken back, to be frozen again in crystal . In the end, Sanders decides to return to the crystals, to be frozen forever. In fact, none of the characters leave, not even Louise. Perhaps no one can leave. It is the end of change. The world, the sun, the universe, everything will turn to crystal. And this end of change, Ballard implies, is what all of us desire. It is this unique combination of the psychological and the physical that makes The Crystal World a very quiet, yet very effective, work of horror fiction.

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