Kingdom Come: A Novel
“Nobody ever hated the contemporary world with as much intensity and conviction as J.G. Ballard...  InKingdom Come, Ballard's latest batch of preapocalyptic savages are happily clad in freshly ironed soccer jerseys and getting ready to fight for the only thing they believe in anymore — shopping at the Metro-Centre...[T]here's a lot of irony in Ballard.  If his late (and very funny) books sound peculiar to American ears, it's probably because of his very English tendency to play almost everything he says, however outrageous, at moderate to low volumes. Unlike the noisier, New Yorkerish avant-garde types who like to shock and awe their readers, Ballard doesn't shout or swear or get in your face.  Even his most disturbing obscenities...are as mannered and concise and unimpassioned as a GPS device's soothing, digitally modulated voice describing how to reach the next gas station.” (Scott Bradfield -New  York Times Book Review)“Starred Review. Ballard (1930–2009) creates a world reminiscent ofA Clockwork OrangeandV for Vendettain this novel of suburban fascism... Ballard writes brilliantly about the nightmarish underside of modern life, and this novel makes us poignantly aware of the loss of his voice.” (Kirkus Reviews)“An assassination, an uprising and masses of people rallying to defend their sacred dome from attack. The temple they’re ready to die for is the Metro-Centre shopping mall, which represents the only meaning in J. G. Ballard’s biting, surreal vision of suburban London. “Consumerism is the one thing that gives us our sense of values,” one local citizen says of the belief system he actually despises. (He turns out to be behind the putsch to reclaim their town from retailers.) The author of 18 novels includingEmpire of the Sun, Ballard, who died in 2009, is more funny than preachy; there’s a certain glee in his spite, as when he writes about the slain leader of these devoted shoppers, the talk-show host of the mall’s cable channel: “Only his hair survived, a blond mane lying across the phlegm-soaked pillow."” (New York Times)“Impressively packed with brilliant apercus.” (Observer)“Ballard, paradoxically, with all his characters gripped by obsession and necessity, is one of the great novelists of freedom.” (Financial Times)“Ballard guides us through this unsettling environment, an exaggerated version of modern Britain, with a sure hand. His sentences, almost anthropological in tone, indicate a boiling over of tension… This is a novel about crowds—Don DeLillo would tip his hat in recognition—and the economic and social conditions that can be used to manipulate them. If the characters inKingdom Comeseem indistinct by comparison; if David Cruise doesn’t quite seem worthy of “the pale aura of suburban fame” that surrounds him—well, perhaps it’s because from this remove, it’s difficult to understand why people would launch into a melee over a waffle iron or camp out for a cell phone. But these things do happen, every year, and Ballard’s novel is at its best when it takes this behavior to its most frightening, but strangely possible, extremes.” (Jacob Silverman -The Daily Beast)“No other writer so effectively alienates his readers—and his protagonists—from an everyday reality that he reveals to be shifting, often nightmarish terrain. At the same time, he soothes us. InKingdom Come, as in Ballard's short stories and in novels likeCrash, the rhythmical balance of the sentences has a tranquilizing effect, like the shushing roar of the ceaseless traffic on the motorway outside Brooklands….  In his final, elegiac vision of suburban apocalypse, Ballard once again allows us to imagine the unthinkable.” (Anna Mundow -Barnes and Noble)“...consumerism run amok deserves the pillorying it gets inKingdom Come. The connections Ballard finds between boredom and neo-fascism are fascinating and disturbing, and they are presented with an experienced satirist’s deft art.” (Tristan Deveney -The Millions)“This is the last book [Ballard] wrote before he died and both his most hilarious and his most terrifying, because it's about a racist middle-class revolt in the London suburbs that uncannily presage the rise of the real-life English Defense League, and also because the narrator is like an even more psychotic version of Richard Grant's character inHow to Get Ahead in Advertising.” (Leroy Gumption -VICE Magazine)