Running Wild

by J.G. Ballard

Book Overview

A massacre rocks a suburban utopia--thirty-two adults murdered, and their children missing--in Running Wild, one of Ballard's most dazzlingly subversive works of fiction. "To Ballard, lack of choice .... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0099634104
• ISBN13: 9780099634102
• Release Date: March 1990
• Publisher: Random House (UK)
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Running Wild Review

Although this book is short, it still has a great story that's haunting and very disturbing. Just from what's on the back you get an idea about what happens, yet as Ballard explains it, it doesn't matter WHAT happened it matters WHY it happened. This book also acts as a chilling prophecy of how western society will become. I read this after I read "Crash", by Ballard, but both books are very different and it's hard to believe that they're both by the same author. It won't take long to read, but it'll be something you'll remember.

An Intriguing First Read

I have actually never read anything by Ballard, and picked this book up on a whim. I can honestly say I am so glad that I did. Although technically an easy read, this book is one you could read several times and still never completely capture. I will definitely pick up more books by Ballard in the future.

Short and sweet.

A group of teenagers who live in a gated community and provided with everything that their parents reckon they should have, suddenly go on the rampage, kill all the adults, and disappear. The police officer investigating the incident figures that the kids reacted against what he comes to consider as sensory deprivation. A young girl is found, left behind by the others. She is the police's best hope of smoking the others out. But the other kids mount a rescue mission to snatch her from a secured hospital after which they again disappear to become rarely seen outlaws.I liked this short book because it presented a good idea with an element of drive I wouldn't normally associate with J G Ballard's rather gentlemanly pace. The illustrations were very nice, too.

It takes a village...

Amidst the sterile routines of suburban England, Ballard tells a short fable about the loving your children too much. The post-mortem objective style of the massacre's investigator adds to the unsettling tone of this novel. Like Ballard's other works (I've read Crash, War Fever, and the Atrocity Exhibition) he explores the subterranean barbarities latent in our denatured, desensitized urban landscape. This novel is hardly one to advocate nurturing our future generations, since the blank-eyed authoritarianism of suburban child nurturing is blamed for the pscychopathic massacre. Loving a child, doesn't mean that the child is free. And the children, suffocated by parental love, suburbia, and technocracy has two routes: suicide (like 'The Virgin Suicides') or murder. Ballard shows that children are far from innocent: little bundles of joy who are ticking time bombs with artificial smiles and revenge fantasies. A must read for parents and high schoolers everywhere.

The key to his later works.

This book is where you should start off to understand Ballard's later fiction (CRASH, ATROCITY EXHIBITION, HIGH RISE, or anything after the early 1970's). This novella reveals Ballards signature pessimism and facination for the technological landscape: its inherent role in the systematization and categorizing of human behaviour. In RUNNING WILD, Ballard shows the devastating effect when our primal urges rears its ugly head after buried for too long. The novella is set in a self-contained living complex (much like HIGH RISE) where tragedy is struck. Like Freud, Ballard accepts the tragic, barbaric reality of humankind and continually asserts (which he does in his latest, COCAINE NIGHTS) that the primal nature of man will subvert, or altogether revolt against any "civilized" attempt to change it. This novel is depressing and revealing. Read it. It won't take long to finish it and it also won't be long before you become a Ballard fanatic.