On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalised autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers and fellow travellers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, this cross-country bohemian odyssey not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture. --Acton Lane

An important book, if not a great one, 27 Aug 2008
On the Road is very much a book of its time. Based around Sal Paradise (who Kerouac has said is based on himself) and his travels back and forth across America (and eventually to Mexico), it's a relentless tale of the need for adventure when life seems stagnant and lonely. With no ties to keep him in any one place, Sal gets in a car with his friends whenever the desire takes him, searching for answers to life's big questions.

Filled with the jazz music of the late 40s, Jack Kerouac's book is like a stream of consciousness, and although this often makes the book hard to 'get into' (I don't think I managed more than 20 pages at a time due to the sometimes disjointed and sometimes repetitive writing style), it does leave you with a real yearning need to get out there and see the world. An important book, if not a great one.


Okay, I get it.., 13 Apr 2008
I understand how books like Kerouac's get elevated to cult status. Take Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing for example, that was much the same as Kerouac and other Beat writers. It was not very poetic or well written but it took you somewhere, to a time and state of mind that was free and different for a new generation. Fear and Loathing is decent, this however is not. Certainly not worth the hype, it's long and boring and as a book alone it has no literary merit. You may read about him, his life and the ephemera around the book - then you may appreciate this more, but standing alone this has to be one of the worst books ever slapped on the high pedestal.

`A primer on how to be a narcissist.', 22 Feb 2008
Before I read `On The Road' I read a critical review by a blog psychiatrist who denounced the work as `a primer on how to be a narcissist.' This struck me as accurate, but not as a valid criticism. The self absorbed characters coping with alienation from of their environment and the consequent dissatisfaction with everything the world offers up is this books strength. The novel describes a particular generation from a particular place and it does so unfalteringly.

Unforgettable!, 01 Aug 2007
A fast paced tale on bumming around america in the 40's music drugs girls and parties. Unforgettable characters and deep conversations that really hit home. Buy this book if you love the thought of getting up and just experiencing whats out there. Highly recommend!

Interesting Read, 01 Feb 2007
This book is a classic so I picked it up. I wouldn't consider myself a HUGE reader but I found this book a bit tough going at first.

The style of writing is that of someone from the beat poet generation who's on the road and bit lost, meaning that there are long sentences which extend right down the page, almost following one train of thought as if it has been written in a complete rant, which is important because he might have forgotten what he was gonna say and then when you least expect it, he'll deviate!!

You get my meaning.

It's an interesting read and I enjoyed it. Not a light book (not a very one either) but certainly one that captures the spirit of freedom and living your life in those uni/post university days/daze.

Case was the best interface cowboy who ever ran in Earth's computer matrix. Then he double- crossed the wrong people.… Winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards.

An important book, if not a great one, 27 Aug 2008
On the Road is very much a book of its time. Based around Sal Paradise (who Kerouac has said is based on himself) and his travels back and forth across America (and eventually to Mexico), it's a relentless tale of the need for adventure when life seems stagnant and lonely. With no ties to keep him in any one place, Sal gets in a car with his friends whenever the desire takes him, searching for answers to life's big questions.

Filled with the jazz music of the late 40s, Jack Kerouac's book is like a stream of consciousness, and although this often makes the book hard to 'get into' (I don't think I managed more than 20 pages at a time due to the sometimes disjointed and sometimes repetitive writing style), it does leave you with a real yearning need to get out there and see the world. An important book, if not a great one.


Okay, I get it.., 13 Apr 2008
I understand how books like Kerouac's get elevated to cult status. Take Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing for example, that was much the same as Kerouac and other Beat writers. It was not very poetic or well written but it took you somewhere, to a time and state of mind that was free and different for a new generation. Fear and Loathing is decent, this however is not. Certainly not worth the hype, it's long and boring and as a book alone it has no literary merit. You may read about him, his life and the ephemera around the book - then you may appreciate this more, but standing alone this has to be one of the worst books ever slapped on the high pedestal.

`A primer on how to be a narcissist.', 22 Feb 2008
Before I read `On The Road' I read a critical review by a blog psychiatrist who denounced the work as `a primer on how to be a narcissist.' This struck me as accurate, but not as a valid criticism. The self absorbed characters coping with alienation from of their environment and the consequent dissatisfaction with everything the world offers up is this books strength. The novel describes a particular generation from a particular place and it does so unfalteringly.

Unforgettable!, 01 Aug 2007
A fast paced tale on bumming around america in the 40's music drugs girls and parties. Unforgettable characters and deep conversations that really hit home. Buy this book if you love the thought of getting up and just experiencing whats out there. Highly recommend!

Interesting Read, 01 Feb 2007
This book is a classic so I picked it up. I wouldn't consider myself a HUGE reader but I found this book a bit tough going at first.

The style of writing is that of someone from the beat poet generation who's on the road and bit lost, meaning that there are long sentences which extend right down the page, almost following one train of thought as if it has been written in a complete rant, which is important because he might have forgotten what he was gonna say and then when you least expect it, he'll deviate!!

You get my meaning.

It's an interesting read and I enjoyed it. Not a light book (not a very one either) but certainly one that captures the spirit of freedom and living your life in those uni/post university days/daze.

Someone to Wachowski me, 30 Dec 2007
I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term and then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" and it is also such a valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totally swept along.

On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived and executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through.

But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, and while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, and from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme and literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, and unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes all this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!).

There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initially forbidding, suddenly "clicks" and carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, and the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, and never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story.

Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily and fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, and even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, and appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was).

Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, and while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us.

Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint and fairly pointless when the internet we do know and love is constructed for its infinite flexibility and re-orderability - the data is just there, and you the user can use what tools you like to order and navigate it to your convenience.

They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down and disentangle Gibson's contorted prose and plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the bits that are different are all marked improvements.

Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, and on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary.

Olly Buxton

The alpha and omega of cyberpunk, 23 Oct 2007
In there beginning the was case, and wintermute saw case and it was good...
The alpha and omega of cyberpunk. This novel was a watershed, any novel of the genre that followed could not helped but be shaped by this superb book. Almost lyrical in style I can remember the moment I first cracked it's spine.

SF Noir...Poetic DreamScapes of a Dystopic Future..., 27 Sep 2007
I have read this masterpiece (together with the other two of the Sprawl series: COUNT ZERO and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE) during my university years, about a decade ago. Since then I have re-read it countless times. Even reading only some pages brings up powerful imagery, dark poetic language, unforgettable prose...

The strength of William Gibson, demonstrated here in full colors, is his ability to create the atmosphere and placing the reader in the middle of things. After reading these books of his, one has the feeling of actually having lived in the Sprawl in a past life!

Start with this one. Then COUNT ZERO. And finally MONA LISA OVERDRIVE.

A Masterpiece Trilogy!!! Own them all!!!

I had to read this book in English class, 02 Jun 2007
A fabulous read and a perfect masterpiece. I have read all of William Gibsons books. Some of his books inspired me to take on Computer Science and artificial intelligence, in particular, at university.
I would advise anyone that has an interest in science fiction, the internet, or anyone else to give it a read. It's a digital cowboy sort of novel which may take a while to gather thoughts from chapter to chapter, but if you are a keen reader you will come to grips with the complex storyline and the sheer simplicity with which it is written.

A science fiction masterwork, 16 Apr 2007
This is one of the most important books of the genre. Yes he got some things wrong - like the cost of Ram (but so did Bill Gates).

The book is something totally new and definitive. It lets you see the dark underside of a internet world. While there are flavours of Metropolis, describing how we deal with human computer interaction, it is mainly a thriller in a technological world.

An important book, if not a great one, 27 Aug 2008
On the Road is very much a book of its time. Based around Sal Paradise (who Kerouac has said is based on himself) and his travels back and forth across America (and eventually to Mexico), it's a relentless tale of the need for adventure when life seems stagnant and lonely. With no ties to keep him in any one place, Sal gets in a car with his friends whenever the desire takes him, searching for answers to life's big questions.

Filled with the jazz music of the late 40s, Jack Kerouac's book is like a stream of consciousness, and although this often makes the book hard to 'get into' (I don't think I managed more than 20 pages at a time due to the sometimes disjointed and sometimes repetitive writing style), it does leave you with a real yearning need to get out there and see the world. An important book, if not a great one.


Okay, I get it.., 13 Apr 2008
I understand how books like Kerouac's get elevated to cult status. Take Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing for example, that was much the same as Kerouac and other Beat writers. It was not very poetic or well written but it took you somewhere, to a time and state of mind that was free and different for a new generation. Fear and Loathing is decent, this however is not. Certainly not worth the hype, it's long and boring and as a book alone it has no literary merit. You may read about him, his life and the ephemera around the book - then you may appreciate this more, but standing alone this has to be one of the worst books ever slapped on the high pedestal.

`A primer on how to be a narcissist.', 22 Feb 2008
Before I read `On The Road' I read a critical review by a blog psychiatrist who denounced the work as `a primer on how to be a narcissist.' This struck me as accurate, but not as a valid criticism. The self absorbed characters coping with alienation from of their environment and the consequent dissatisfaction with everything the world offers up is this books strength. The novel describes a particular generation from a particular place and it does so unfalteringly.

Unforgettable!, 01 Aug 2007
A fast paced tale on bumming around america in the 40's music drugs girls and parties. Unforgettable characters and deep conversations that really hit home. Buy this book if you love the thought of getting up and just experiencing whats out there. Highly recommend!

Interesting Read, 01 Feb 2007
This book is a classic so I picked it up. I wouldn't consider myself a HUGE reader but I found this book a bit tough going at first.

The style of writing is that of someone from the beat poet generation who's on the road and bit lost, meaning that there are long sentences which extend right down the page, almost following one train of thought as if it has been written in a complete rant, which is important because he might have forgotten what he was gonna say and then when you least expect it, he'll deviate!!

You get my meaning.

It's an interesting read and I enjoyed it. Not a light book (not a very one either) but certainly one that captures the spirit of freedom and living your life in those uni/post university days/daze.

Someone to Wachowski me, 30 Dec 2007
I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term and then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" and it is also such a valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totally swept along.

On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived and executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through.

But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, and while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, and from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme and literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, and unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes all this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!).

There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initially forbidding, suddenly "clicks" and carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, and the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, and never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story.

Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily and fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, and even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, and appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was).

Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, and while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us.

Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint and fairly pointless when the internet we do know and love is constructed for its infinite flexibility and re-orderability - the data is just there, and you the user can use what tools you like to order and navigate it to your convenience.

They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down and disentangle Gibson's contorted prose and plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the bits that are different are all marked improvements.

Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, and on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary.

Olly Buxton

The alpha and omega of cyberpunk, 23 Oct 2007
In there beginning the was case, and wintermute saw case and it was good...
The alpha and omega of cyberpunk. This novel was a watershed, any novel of the genre that followed could not helped but be shaped by this superb book. Almost lyrical in style I can remember the moment I first cracked it's spine.

SF Noir...Poetic DreamScapes of a Dystopic Future..., 27 Sep 2007
I have read this masterpiece (together with the other two of the Sprawl series: COUNT ZERO and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE) during my university years, about a decade ago. Since then I have re-read it countless times. Even reading only some pages brings up powerful imagery, dark poetic language, unforgettable prose...

The strength of William Gibson, demonstrated here in full colors, is his ability to create the atmosphere and placing the reader in the middle of things. After reading these books of his, one has the feeling of actually having lived in the Sprawl in a past life!

Start with this one. Then COUNT ZERO. And finally MONA LISA OVERDRIVE.

A Masterpiece Trilogy!!! Own them all!!!

I had to read this book in English class, 02 Jun 2007
A fabulous read and a perfect masterpiece. I have read all of William Gibsons books. Some of his books inspired me to take on Computer Science and artificial intelligence, in particular, at university.
I would advise anyone that has an interest in science fiction, the internet, or anyone else to give it a read. It's a digital cowboy sort of novel which may take a while to gather thoughts from chapter to chapter, but if you are a keen reader you will come to grips with the complex storyline and the sheer simplicity with which it is written.

A science fiction masterwork, 16 Apr 2007
This is one of the most important books of the genre. Yes he got some things wrong - like the cost of Ram (but so did Bill Gates).

The book is something totally new and definitive. It lets you see the dark underside of a internet world. While there are flavours of Metropolis, describing how we deal with human computer interaction, it is mainly a thriller in a technological world.

Of no literary worth, 17 Jun 2008
Reviews are by nature subjective. That said, their should be a common element, an underlying current that runs through all reviews which peg the book (in this instance) at a similar level. That established, here I find myself rather baffled as to how anyone can either dredge or salvage anything from this book that would elevate it beyond a three star rating at maximum; there must be an element of consensus, because this book (or indeed any) has a basic content and structure, characters and plot that are capable of evaluation and critique. Let us call a spade a spade and not a shovel, this is a shovel!

I teach literature at university level and I am astounded how this book finds its way onto numerous 'must read' lists that appear on the internet and periodically in print. I can only imagine that the editors of such list either fail to read the entire content of said list, or they are simply keen to perpetuate the tired myths that unfortunately ensure largely worthless texts like this still make college reading lists. Either that or they simply read the dust jacket and go by the advertising copy; which according to the 'Vintage Classic' version I bought, sells this book as being, 'a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the old testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn'. Categorically is not, and I defy, nay challenge the publishers or indeed anyone to substantiate such a claim.

How ever you spin it, what ultimately transpires is that for any of the above reasons or others equally illogical, perfectly good texts - especially modern ones, are constantly ignored as white elephants like this go through their umpteenth re-print.

To get down to brass tacks, this book fails for a number of reasons, but amongst those I would cite the following five as being the major points of contention:
i) It is simply VERY boring indeed. A dull tale if ever one was told.
ii) The characters are neither well-established or particularly well-drawn. Faulkner's literary skills presented herein are neither worth of his acclaim nor his many accolades and awards.
iii) Structurally it is a simple narrative (not necessarily a problem), however, his language (except the odd regional accent) is unchallenging and unprovocative.
iv) It essentially fails to offer the reader anything. No new ideas, no philosophical insights, no social observations and no historical documentary per se. I think I picked out and highlighted about four sentences in the whole book, that I felt were interesting.
v) Finally, it fails to establish a new genre, a new mode of expression. Likewise it also fails to re-establish a current mode or extend and develop a literary style. In plain terms that means it belongs nowhere, has no recognisable nor definable style and yet fails to take new steps in establish a new genre; it is amateurish and unaccomplished.

The only plus point that one can give is the use of parallel narration that is quite interesting and mildly revolutionary. That said, the characters are not well enough established, nor well enough drawn as to make full use of this technique and so it simply adds confusion to the overall structure.

I cannot see one logical or justifiable reason why anyone should waste their time or their money in reading this text. Unless it is prescribed reading, in which case I would question the teachers motivations for electing this a a core or supplementary text. I think if you are studying American Literature, literature of death and dying, family structures etc. there are MUCH better books out there than this.

Dark Comedy and Psychological Realism, 02 Nov 2007
I just got thru reading As I Lay Dying for a college class. As I have read no other Faulkner, I cannot compare this with his other works. Although it takes time to get adjusted to it, the novel itself is grand, a tour de force as Faulkner called it. The family experiences Addie's loss.
Each character is fully realized, and every last one of them (in the family, anyway) is insane. Jewel is constantly cursing and using violence to express his love and anger. This is in direct relationship with his mother, because she did so with him. The very thing that defines him is when he calls his horse "You sweet son of a b----". That he how he relates to the world. He is a very angry young man, and cannot express himself properly without resorting to foul language.

Darl is a very interesting character. Although you may not catch it less you are paying attention, he has a telepathic ability, to read into people's mind. He is very perceptive. So perceptive, in fact, that in one chapter in the first part he describes what is happening at the house as Addie Bundren dies, and he and Jewel are away from the house selling materials. His relationship with Addie is strained at best. She loves Jewel best. In manner of speech, Addie and Darl are closest, being very poetic in speech.

Cash is 28/29 and Vardaman's age isn't given. He is a little boy. Cash makes the casket for his mother. Vardaman becomes very confused during the duration of the novel, because he catches a fish in the beginning. The fish dies and they eat it (this is a correlation of the family being like buzzards during the journey). One chapter consists of a single sentence. "My mother is a fish". It is also foreshadowing of one of the more comic events in the novel. Darl says of Jewel, whose relationship with his horse is based after his relationship with his mother, that his mother is a horse, speaking metaphorically. Vardaman takes that literally also. If Jewel's mother can be a horse, he insists his mother can be a fish.

Tull is the only sane one in the story, and he is not a member of the family. He is a neighbour who is helping with the family. Cora, his wife, serves God in a cliche way, and is generally niave. Brother Whitaker, without revealing too much of the plot, is important. Anse, the father, is hilarious. He says he cannot sweat because of some illness he got when he was 20. He won't do a damn thing. He won't be "beholden" to any man, which he says all the time. But he really doesn't want to do anything, and wants others to do it for him.

Dewey Dell is a very simple creature. She gets pregnant, and wants to have an abortion. She doesn't understand morality. Her intellect pales in comparison to Darl's; however, they have a psychic link together. Someone like this God would not judge harshly, because she does not have understanding.

Addie Bundren in the single most important character in the novel. Her chapter is a little past the center of the novel. The reason, one interpretation goes, is that Addie is like the spoke of a wheel, where the spoke is in the center, and everything is connected to it and comes out of it. She is a very hateful person. Although very poetic, she hates words, thinking them meaningless.

Sex to the Bundren family is not governed by morality (or at least they don't think it is). My teacher likened it to barnyard sex: animals are not governed by morality, and they just have sex. This is much the approach of this family, although of course they are wrong. Man is above animals, and morality governs this matter. Dewey Dell, of which much of the imagery associated with her is sexual, is very simple and knows nothing of sexual morality. Her name suggests her simpleton sexuality. Dewey Dell means "Moist Valley". Not to much of a stretch of an imagination to know what that means. She gets pregnant by Lafe. Dewey Dell is such of limited intelligence that she goes to the pharmacy at the end of the novel to get an abortion. The soda jerk tells her to come back, and then he has sex with her. She curses afterward, saying that won't cure anything. Darl and Cash masturbated while growing up. Addie is still lonely even though she has sexual relations with her husband, so goes elsewhere to find it. (Her children were there to cure her loneliness. An important lesson is lurking here: sex and children are two of the most precious gifts from God: they are exactly that - gifts. One must know Christ to have a truly fulfilled life).

Dark humour is very prevalent thruout the entire novel. Everything from Addie making her water trip to Anse getting those teeth to them dragging the body, stinking up everything, the novel is hilarious. Anse says he owes it to Addie to take her there, saying he won't disgrace her. Yet the whole journey is disgraceful. It is one of the funniest books in a dark sense that I have read in a long time. To speak to much of this would ruin some of the moments; but rest assured, if you properly imagine the events, it should strike you quite funny.

In conclusion, Faulkner has created a portrait dysfunctional family. He said he wrote this, and knew if he never picked up a pen again he would live or die (reputation wise) by this book. (Quote paraphrased) He also does his stream of conscious and multiple narrators, making this foray notable because of it. Each is fully drawn, with excellent psychological realism. The characterization is excellent. Read it.

Originally issued on Amazon.com May 15, 2000



Stream of consciousness written in Deep South vernacular. Phew!, 25 Sep 2007
Novels written in the vernacular can be problematic for the outsider. When they are additionally narrated in a pre-war stream of consciousness style and by a number of different individuals the difficulties are magnified. Of course, that is the point of the book: to convey the emotions and reactions of different members of a family about the same event; the event being the death of the southern matriarch Addie Bundren whose decaying body is transported far away to her home town for burial as she had requested. The journey consists of a series of grotesque and darkly humorous mishaps as relationships, disputes and bonds between family and neighbours are gradually revealed in around sixty extremely brief chapters of narration. It takes some unravelling and is really a question as to whether or not the reader feels it is all worthwhile. Maybe it is - just.

Stunning, 26 Jun 2007
A stunning piece of literature that keeps coming back to you with new thoughts and ideas. It definitely warrants more than one reading.

Pilgrim's Progress to the Promised Land, 05 Sep 2004
Faulkner's great accomplishment in this novel is to use the most modern fiction techniques to create a timeless allegory that we would probably not accept in a different style. His other great achievement is to leave so much space in the story for us to participate in adding meaning. You have to pay attention to even notice what is going on, and then you can provide a variety of interpretations. This novel will never be the same for any two readers. It is a stunning accomplishment, as a result.

The story begins as Addie Bundren lays dying, fanned by her daughter, while her son makes her coffin. With her husband and five children, we make her acquaintance by learning about their actions and characters. Only once does she have a role as a narrator, and then, quite late in the story.

Her husband, Anse, has promised her that he will bury her with her family. Because of tremendous rains, the river has risen, knocking out bridges and making passage difficult. Despite this, the family perseveres in taking her unembalmed body to the intended burial site. Along the way, there are many mishaps and the family is burdened in many ways by keeping this promise. As the burial comes closer, new elements of the story are exposed and develop that totally recast what you have thought was going on.

The story is a difficult one to read. So read this book when you have time to pay close attention and study the text word by word. Let me explain the difficulties you will encounter. First, the voices in the book use a Southern patois that will be unfamiliar to most. This is the language of the rural poor in the 1930s, which few have heard. Second, the exposition is mostly through thoughts, often expressed in fragmentary form, rather than through action and a smooth narrative. Third, the narration is a partial mosaic of impressions of the characters, jumping back and forth in 2-4 page segments. Their perceptions are partial, and even more partially expressed. Objectivity is shunned by Faulkner. Fourth, Faulkner wants you to fill in the gaps, and the best way to do that is to expose the gaps slowly. Only after 3 or 4 narrations by characters will the gaps begin to emerge in a way you can grasp them. Then, you still have to interpret them.

Few readers will miss the references to Moses and his search for the promised land, and the Christian parable of the Pilgrim's Progress. What is unstated is the connection to reading this book. Many poor Southern people of that time were taught to read with The Pilgrim's Progress as a primer. That experience helped to shape a perception and a sensibility that would influence their actions, and thus, this tale. That connection creates a wonderful series of circles here that build on one another.

At bottom though, it is clear from this book that there are secrets of the heart that are never exposed in public. When we come close to dying (our own or someone else's), these secrets begin to rise closer to the surface where we (and sometimes others) can see them.

Faulkner has one quirk in the book that I urge you to look for. While he is often conveying the thoughts of uneducated people, he will drop in magnificent phrases that are worthy of Shakespeare. He wants you to know that he is a learned man, hiding behind his humble bards. That pride creates flaws in the book, but flaws that are a delight to the reader, nevertheless. In fact, he takes this one step further by employing many of Shakespeare's favorite techniques from foreshadowing through nature's fury through using fools.

After you have read this book, I encourage you to consider what secret desires, actions, fears, and thoughts you have which you keep buried even from yourself. Then consider the potential benefits of making these known, before you lay dying.

Also, whenever things seem confused, consider how others may be perceiving what is going on. Like Vardeman, they too may think their mother is a fish. Accept their view of reality, and communicate in terms of that perception if you want to make contact. Otherwise, you will be alone even in the middle of your family, as the Bundrens were in As I Lay Dying.

Enjoy this American masterpiece! I think you'll find it irresistible and moving.

Easily one of the 20th century's most visionary writers, JG Ballard still lives far ahead of his time. Called his "prophetic masterpiece" by many, The Atrocity Exhibition practically lies outside of any literary tradition. Part science fiction, part eerie historical fiction, part pornography, its characters adhere to no rules of linearity or stability. This reissued edition features an introduction by William S Burroughs, extensive text commentary by Ballard and four additional stories. Of specific interest are the illustrations by underground cartoonist and professional medical illustrator Phoebe Gloeckner. Her ultra-realistic images of eroticism and destruction add an important dimension to Ballard's text. --Joaquim della Mirandella

An important book, if not a great one, 27 Aug 2008
On the Road is very much a book of its time. Based around Sal Paradise (who Kerouac has said is based on himself) and his travels back and forth across America (and eventually to Mexico), it's a relentless tale of the need for adventure when life seems stagnant and lonely. With no ties to keep him in any one place, Sal gets in a car with his friends whenever the desire takes him, searching for answers to life's big questions.

Filled with the jazz music of the late 40s, Jack Kerouac's book is like a stream of consciousness, and although this often makes the book hard to 'get into' (I don't think I managed more than 20 pages at a time due to the sometimes disjointed and sometimes repetitive writing style), it does leave you with a real yearning need to get out there and see the world. An important book, if not a great one.


Okay, I get it.., 13 Apr 2008
I understand how books like Kerouac's get elevated to cult status. Take Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing for example, that was much the same as Kerouac and other Beat writers. It was not very poetic or well written but it took you somewhere, to a time and state of mind that was free and different for a new generation. Fear and Loathing is decent, this however is not. Certainly not worth the hype, it's long and boring and as a book alone it has no literary merit. You may read about him, his life and the ephemera around the book - then you may appreciate this more, but standing alone this has to be one of the worst books ever slapped on the high pedestal.

`A primer on how to be a narcissist.', 22 Feb 2008
Before I read `On The Road' I read a critical review by a blog psychiatrist who denounced the work as `a primer on how to be a narcissist.' This struck me as accurate, but not as a valid criticism. The self absorbed characters coping with alienation from of their environment and the consequent dissatisfaction with everything the world offers up is this books strength. The novel describes a particular generation from a particular place and it does so unfalteringly.

Unforgettable!, 01 Aug 2007
A fast paced tale on bumming around america in the 40's music drugs girls and parties. Unforgettable characters and deep conversations that really hit home. Buy this book if you love the thought of getting up and just experiencing whats out there. Highly recommend!

Interesting Read, 01 Feb 2007
This book is a classic so I picked it up. I wouldn't consider myself a HUGE reader but I found this book a bit tough going at first.

The style of writing is that of someone from the beat poet generation who's on the road and bit lost, meaning that there are long sentences which extend right down the page, almost following one train of thought as if it has been written in a complete rant, which is important because he might have forgotten what he was gonna say and then when you least expect it, he'll deviate!!

You get my meaning.

It's an interesting read and I enjoyed it. Not a light book (not a very one either) but certainly one that captures the spirit of freedom and living your life in those uni/post university days/daze.

Someone to Wachowski me, 30 Dec 2007
I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term and then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" and it is also such a valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totally swept along.

On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived and executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through.

But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, and while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, and from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme and literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, and unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes all this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!).

There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initially forbidding, suddenly "clicks" and carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, and the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, and never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story.

Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily and fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, and even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, and appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was).

Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, and while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us.

Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint and fairly pointless when the internet we do know and love is constructed for its infinite flexibility and re-orderability - the data is just there, and you the user can use what tools you like to order and navigate it to your convenience.

They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down and disentangle Gibson's contorted prose and plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the bits that are different are all marked improvements.

Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, and on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary.

Olly Buxton

The alpha and omega of cyberpunk, 23 Oct 2007
In there beginning the was case, and wintermute saw case and it was good...
The alpha and omega of cyberpunk. This novel was a watershed, any novel of the genre that followed could not helped but be shaped by this superb book. Almost lyrical in style I can remember the moment I first cracked it's spine.

SF Noir...Poetic DreamScapes of a Dystopic Future..., 27 Sep 2007
I have read this masterpiece (together with the other two of the Sprawl series: COUNT ZERO and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE) during my university years, about a decade ago. Since then I have re-read it countless times. Even reading only some pages brings up powerful imagery, dark poetic language, unforgettable prose...

The strength of William Gibson, demonstrated here in full colors, is his ability to create the atmosphere and placing the reader in the middle of things. After reading these books of his, one has the feeling of actually having lived in the Sprawl in a past life!

Start with this one. Then COUNT ZERO. And finally MONA LISA OVERDRIVE.

A Masterpiece Trilogy!!! Own them all!!!

I had to read this book in English class, 02 Jun 2007
A fabulous read and a perfect masterpiece. I have read all of William Gibsons books. Some of his books inspired me to take on Computer Science and artificial intelligence, in particular, at university.
I would advise anyone that has an interest in science fiction, the internet, or anyone else to give it a read. It's a digital cowboy sort of novel which may take a while to gather thoughts from chapter to chapter, but if you are a keen reader you will come to grips with the complex storyline and the sheer simplicity with which it is written.

A science fiction masterwork, 16 Apr 2007
This is one of the most important books of the genre. Yes he got some things wrong - like the cost of Ram (but so did Bill Gates).

The book is something totally new and definitive. It lets you see the dark underside of a internet world. While there are flavours of Metropolis, describing how we deal with human computer interaction, it is mainly a thriller in a technological world.

Of no literary worth, 17 Jun 2008
Reviews are by nature subjective. That said, their should be a common element, an underlying current that runs through all reviews which peg the book (in this instance) at a similar level. That established, here I find myself rather baffled as to how anyone can either dredge or salvage anything from this book that would elevate it beyond a three star rating at maximum; there must be an element of consensus, because this book (or indeed any) has a basic content and structure, characters and plot that are capable of evaluation and critique. Let us call a spade a spade and not a shovel, this is a shovel!

I teach literature at university level and I am astounded how this book finds its way onto numerous 'must read' lists that appear on the internet and periodically in print. I can only imagine that the editors of such list either fail to read the entire content of said list, or they are simply keen to perpetuate the tired myths that unfortunately ensure largely worthless texts like this still make college reading lists. Either that or they simply read the dust jacket and go by the advertising copy; which according to the 'Vintage Classic' version I bought, sells this book as being, 'a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the old testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn'. Categorically is not, and I defy, nay challenge the publishers or indeed anyone to substantiate such a claim.

How ever you spin it, what ultimately transpires is that for any of the above reasons or others equally illogical, perfectly good texts - especially modern ones, are constantly ignored as white elephants like this go through their umpteenth re-print.

To get down to brass tacks, this book fails for a number of reasons, but amongst those I would cite the following five as being the major points of contention:
i) It is simply VERY boring indeed. A dull tale if ever one was told.
ii) The characters are neither well-established or particularly well-drawn. Faulkner's literary skills presented herein are neither worth of his acclaim nor his many accolades and awards.
iii) Structurally it is a simple narrative (not necessarily a problem), however, his language (except the odd regional accent) is unchallenging and unprovocative.
iv) It essentially fails to offer the reader anything. No new ideas, no philosophical insights, no social observations and no historical documentary per se. I think I picked out and highlighted about four sentences in the whole book, that I felt were interesting.
v) Finally, it fails to establish a new genre, a new mode of expression. Likewise it also fails to re-establish a current mode or extend and develop a literary style. In plain terms that means it belongs nowhere, has no recognisable nor definable style and yet fails to take new steps in establish a new genre; it is amateurish and unaccomplished.

The only plus point that one can give is the use of parallel narration that is quite interesting and mildly revolutionary. That said, the characters are not well enough established, nor well enough drawn as to make full use of this technique and so it simply adds confusion to the overall structure.

I cannot see one logical or justifiable reason why anyone should waste their time or their money in reading this text. Unless it is prescribed reading, in which case I would question the teachers motivations for electing this a a core or supplementary text. I think if you are studying American Literature, literature of death and dying, family structures etc. there are MUCH better books out there than this.

Dark Comedy and Psychological Realism, 02 Nov 2007
I just got thru reading As I Lay Dying for a college class. As I have read no other Faulkner, I cannot compare this with his other works. Although it takes time to get adjusted to it, the novel itself is grand, a tour de force as Faulkner called it. The family experiences Addie's loss.
Each character is fully realized, and every last one of them (in the family, anyway) is insane. Jewel is constantly cursing and using violence to express his love and anger. This is in direct relationship with his mother, because she did so with him. The very thing that defines him is when he calls his horse "You sweet son of a b----". That he how he relates to the world. He is a very angry young man, and cannot express himself properly without resorting to foul language.

Darl is a very interesting character. Although you may not catch it less you are paying attention, he has a telepathic ability, to read into people's mind. He is very perceptive. So perceptive, in fact, that in one chapter in the first part he describes what is happening at the house as Addie Bundren dies, and he and Jewel are away from the house selling materials. His relationship with Addie is strained at best. She loves Jewel best. In manner of speech, Addie and Darl are closest, being very poetic in speech.

Cash is 28/29 and Vardaman's age isn't given. He is a little boy. Cash makes the casket for his mother. Vardaman becomes very confused during the duration of the novel, because he catches a fish in the beginning. The fish dies and they eat it (this is a correlation of the family being like buzzards during the journey). One chapter consists of a single sentence. "My mother is a fish". It is also foreshadowing of one of the more comic events in the novel. Darl says of Jewel, whose relationship with his horse is based after his relationship with his mother, that his mother is a horse, speaking metaphorically. Vardaman takes that literally also. If Jewel's mother can be a horse, he insists his mother can be a fish.

Tull is the only sane one in the story, and he is not a member of the family. He is a neighbour who is helping with the family. Cora, his wife, serves God in a cliche way, and is generally niave. Brother Whitaker, without revealing too much of the plot, is important. Anse, the father, is hilarious. He says he cannot sweat because of some illness he got when he was 20. He won't do a damn thing. He won't be "beholden" to any man, which he says all the time. But he really doesn't want to do anything, and wants others to do it for him.

Dewey Dell is a very simple creature. She gets pregnant, and wants to have an abortion. She doesn't understand morality. Her intellect pales in comparison to Darl's; however, they have a psychic link together. Someone like this God would not judge harshly, because she does not have understanding.

Addie Bundren in the single most important character in the novel. Her chapter is a little past the center of the novel. The reason, one interpretation goes, is that Addie is like the spoke of a wheel, where the spoke is in the center, and everything is connected to it and comes out of it. She is a very hateful person. Although very poetic, she hates words, thinking them meaningless.

Sex to the Bundren family is not governed by morality (or at least they don't think it is). My teacher likened it to barnyard sex: animals are not governed by morality, and they just have sex. This is much the approach of this family, although of course they are wrong. Man is above animals, and morality governs this matter. Dewey Dell, of which much of the imagery associated with her is sexual, is very simple and knows nothing of sexual morality. Her name suggests her simpleton sexuality. Dewey Dell means "Moist Valley". Not to much of a stretch of an imagination to know what that means. She gets pregnant by Lafe. Dewey Dell is such of limited intelligence that she goes to the pharmacy at the end of the novel to get an abortion. The soda jerk tells her to come back, and then he has sex with her. She curses afterward, saying that won't cure anything. Darl and Cash masturbated while growing up. Addie is still lonely even though she has sexual relations with her husband, so goes elsewhere to find it. (Her children were there to cure her loneliness. An important lesson is lurking here: sex and children are two of the most precious gifts from God: they are exactly that - gifts. One must know Christ to have a truly fulfilled life).

Dark humour is very prevalent thruout the entire novel. Everything from Addie making her water trip to Anse getting those teeth to them dragging the body, stinking up everything, the novel is hilarious. Anse says he owes it to Addie to take her there, saying he won't disgrace her. Yet the whole journey is disgraceful. It is one of the funniest books in a dark sense that I have read in a long time. To speak to much of this would ruin some of the moments; but rest assured, if you properly imagine the events, it should strike you quite funny.

In conclusion, Faulkner has created a portrait dysfunctional family. He said he wrote this, and knew if he never picked up a pen again he would live or die (reputation wise) by this book. (Quote paraphrased) He also does his stream of conscious and multiple narrators, making this foray notable because of it. Each is fully drawn, with excellent psychological realism. The characterization is excellent. Read it.

Originally issued on Amazon.com May 15, 2000



Stream of consciousness written in Deep South vernacular. Phew!, 25 Sep 2007
Novels written in the vernacular can be problematic for the outsider. When they are additionally narrated in a pre-war stream of consciousness style and by a number of different individuals the difficulties are magnified. Of course, that is the point of the book: to convey the emotions and reactions of different members of a family about the same event; the event being the death of the southern matriarch Addie Bundren whose decaying body is transported far away to her home town for burial as she had requested. The journey consists of a series of grotesque and darkly humorous mishaps as relationships, disputes and bonds between family and neighbours are gradually revealed in around sixty extremely brief chapters of narration. It takes some unravelling and is really a question as to whether or not the reader feels it is all worthwhile. Maybe it is - just.

Stunning, 26 Jun 2007
A stunning piece of literature that keeps coming back to you with new thoughts and ideas. It definitely warrants more than one reading.

Pilgrim's Progress to the Promised Land, 05 Sep 2004
Faulkner's great accomplishment in this novel is to use the most modern fiction techniques to create a timeless allegory that we would probably not accept in a different style. His other great achievement is to leave so much space in the story for us to participate in adding meaning. You have to pay attention to even notice what is going on, and then you can provide a variety of interpretations. This novel will never be the same for any two readers. It is a stunning accomplishment, as a result.

The story begins as Addie Bundren lays dying, fanned by her daughter, while her son makes her coffin. With her husband and five children, we make her acquaintance by learning about their actions and characters. Only once does she have a role as a narrator, and then, quite late in the story.

Her husband, Anse, has promised her that he will bury her with her family. Because of tremendous rains, the river has risen, knocking out bridges and making passage difficult. Despite this, the family perseveres in taking her unembalmed body to the intended burial site. Along the way, there are many mishaps and the family is burdened in many ways by keeping this promise. As the burial comes closer, new elements of the story are exposed and develop that totally recast what you have thought was going on.

The story is a difficult one to read. So read this book when you have time to pay close attention and study the text word by word. Let me explain the difficulties you will encounter. First, the voices in the book use a Southern patois that will be unfamiliar to most. This is the language of the rural poor in the 1930s, which few have heard. Second, the exposition is mostly through thoughts, often expressed in fragmentary form, rather than through action and a smooth narrative. Third, the narration is a partial mosaic of impressions of the characters, jumping back and forth in 2-4 page segments. Their perceptions are partial, and even more partially expressed. Objectivity is shunned by Faulkner. Fourth, Faulkner wants you to fill in the gaps, and the best way to do that is to expose the gaps slowly. Only after 3 or 4 narrations by characters will the gaps begin to emerge in a way you can grasp them. Then, you still have to interpret them.

Few readers will miss the references to Moses and his search for the promised land, and the Christian parable of the Pilgrim's Progress. What is unstated is the connection to reading this book. Many poor Southern people of that time were taught to read with The Pilgrim's Progress as a primer. That experience helped to shape a perception and a sensibility that would influence their actions, and thus, this tale. That connection creates a wonderful series of circles here that build on one another.

At bottom though, it is clear from this book that there are secrets of the heart that are never exposed in public. When we come close to dying (our own or someone else's), these secrets begin to rise closer to the surface where we (and sometimes others) can see them.

Faulkner has one quirk in the book that I urge you to look for. While he is often conveying the thoughts of uneducated people, he will drop in magnificent phrases that are worthy of Shakespeare. He wants you to know that he is a learned man, hiding behind his humble bards. That pride creates flaws in the book, but flaws that are a delight to the reader, nevertheless. In fact, he takes this one step further by employing many of Shakespeare's favorite techniques from foreshadowing through nature's fury through using fools.

After you have read this book, I encourage you to consider what secret desires, actions, fears, and thoughts you have which you keep buried even from yourself. Then consider the potential benefits of making these known, before you lay dying.

Also, whenever things seem confused, consider how others may be perceiving what is going on. Like Vardeman, they too may think their mother is a fish. Accept their view of reality, and communicate in terms of that perception if you want to make contact. Otherwise, you will be alone even in the middle of your family, as the Bundrens were in As I Lay Dying.

Enjoy this American masterpiece! I think you'll find it irresistible and moving.

I hope I'm not thick, 05 Aug 2008
I think I'm a pretty bright sort of a bloke. I got a good degree in English Literature from a very respectable university. I'm pretty knowledgable and can grasp fairly difficult concepts. But I'm not ashamed to admit (I am ashamed really) that this book floored me.

I appreciate it is experimental and understand that it probably gives great pleasure to those who "get" what Ballard is doing. But it is extremely obscure, written in a highly-florid, conceptual style and I found it unreadable. Instead of becoming involved with it I ended up just looking at words on a page and although I could appreciate the semantics of each sentence, getting any kind of notion of what was happening across the novel escaped me.

So should you be considering purchasing the book my advice would be this: If you like poetry you might like this. If you enjoy the deciphering of poetry, enjoy the subtext and enjoy the playing with ideas and forms of literature, then you might like this. Otherwise, you probably won't.

I have not read any other books by this author but do intend to. I hope that The Atrocity Exhibition was just very self-indulgent on his part and that I do not waste another eight quid on my next Ballard.

The 'atrocious' exhibition, 05 Jan 2006
'The Atrocity Exhibition' is a very apt title, because I have never read a more atrocious book. 'Experimental' translated means 'Avant-Garde', He mentions rape, torture, paedophilia, people who are aroused by Vietnam's child napalm victims and people who are aroused by viewing car crashes. As if this weren't bad enough, he writes the book in a willfully obscure, difficult, awkward style - hence the 'experimental' label.

Essentially what Ballard is trying to do is dazzle us with his expansive vocabulary, but it cannot change the fact that the novel is meaningless. I for one am not impressed by someone who uses ten-syllable words continuously.

Barely a paragraph goes by where he isn't making some crude or unpleasant outlandish sexual reference, even to the point where he is implying that anyone who is an anti-war protestor is sexually inadequate. There are numerous of these bizarre and disturbing thoughts.

I fail to see how anyone could 'enjoy' this novel, as it is not the kind of novel you can enjoy. Once you have come to terms with his style of writing, the novel just becomes tedious. I do not think there is an overall point. Avoid this obscene and tedious novel at ALL costs!

Truly visionary, 03 Oct 2005
Will Self describes this book, on the cover, as representing "the zenith of the experimental novel in English. Ballard's marginalia are a tour de force, a wholy original work in their own right."

This annotated edition with an excellent introduction by William Burroughs and Ballard's own chapter notes, written with over twenty years hindsight, further enhances a novel that already made Ballard stand out as one of greatest soothsayers of the twentieth century.

Obsessively documenting his obsessions and preoccupations, this novel cuts deep into the fabric of contemporary society. Not an easy read but an invaluable testament of our time, now with added historic perspective.

Every good novel should change your life - this will alter your perceptions in an astonishing and radical manner. Not to be missed.

Best book I ever read!, 30 Aug 2005
Yes, this is a difficult and complex book. Yes, it is dense, cryptic and multi-layered. Yes, it lacks a clear linear plot. Yes, it is packed with complex and repetitive images. It is also Ballard's finest work, a collection of frames from a film that evokes all the obsessions and symbols of the latter years of the twentieth century.
And to answer the last reviewer, yes, I think it is great.

amazing - the geometry of virtual un-reality, 28 Aug 2005
ballard himself said that every paragraph of this frightening, obscure and obtuse puzzle-fiction is a condensed novel. it's true and puts most other writers to shame: experimental and totally transgressive.
the imagination and wayward-intelligence behind the ideas here might lead you to think it was written by an maverick escapee of a mental asylum (maybe travis, trabert, talbolt or traven)but ballard, like orwell and huxley, knows exactly what he's talking about.
there's abandoned airfields where recreations of the jfk assassination take place, studies of the geometry of bits of car in relation to calculated sexual poses, the encyclopedia of imaginary diseases, dali, max ernst, the death-crashes of james dean, albert camus.
first published as a collected 'novel' in 1969 it embodies the start/end of the space race, psychopathology of the modern icon and the possibilities of celebrity car-death.
the annotations by ballard in this edition are very helpful in creating an understanding of some of the less obvious content without detracting from the ferocity of the ideas.
'atrocity exhibition' is the only title this book could possibly have.

Brett Easton Ellis established a reputation as the enfant terrible of American fiction in the 1980s with his controversial novel Less than Zero, but with the publication of American Psycho he became established as one of the most notorious and reviled novelists currently writing. American Psycho deserves its controversy. The novel opens with a sign scrawled above a New York subway station: "Abandon hope all ye who enter". So begins a hellish descent into the world of Patrick Bateman, the novel's protagonist. Bateman is a handsome 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie, who spends his days listening to Whitney Houston and working out which exclusive restaurant to eat in and what clothes to wear in a dizzying parody of 1980s consumerism run mad.

However, Bateman also has a darker side; he is a psychopathic serial killer, with a penchant for torturing and sexually abusing young women before killing them in the most gruesome and explicit fashion. The novel contains little actual plot, and consists of extended descriptions of exclusive restaurants, designer clothes, TV shows and the minutiae of Bateman's vacuous world, relieved only by clinically described scenes of torture and mutilation which are not for the faint-hearted. Bateman makes little attempt to justify his actions, merely claiming that "this is the way the world--my world--moves". As a satire on the bankrupt, money-driven world of the 1980s, American Psycho is a successful, if rather heavy-handed piece of fiction, whose controversy seems only set to increase. --Jerry Brotton

An important book, if not a great one, 27 Aug 2008
On the Road is very much a book of its time. Based around Sal Paradise (who Kerouac has said is based on himself) and his travels back and forth across America (and eventually to Mexico), it's a relentless tale of the need for adventure when life seems stagnant and lonely. With no ties to keep him in any one place, Sal gets in a car with his friends whenever the desire takes him, searching for answers to life's big questions.

Filled with the jazz music of the late 40s, Jack Kerouac's book is like a stream of consciousness, and although this often makes the book hard to 'get into' (I don't think I managed more than 20 pages at a time due to the sometimes disjointed and sometimes repetitive writing style), it does leave you with a real yearning need to get out there and see the world. An important book, if not a great one.


Okay, I get it.., 13 Apr 2008
I understand how books like Kerouac's get elevated to cult status. Take Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing for example, that was much the same as Kerouac and other Beat writers. It was not very poetic or well written but it took you somewhere, to a time and state of mind that was free and different for a new generation. Fear and Loathing is decent, this however is not. Certainly not worth the hype, it's long and boring and as a book alone it has no literary merit. You may read about him, his life and the ephemera around the book - then you may appreciate this more, but standing alone this has to be one of the worst books ever slapped on the high pedestal.

`A primer on how to be a narcissist.', 22 Feb 2008
Before I read `On The Road' I read a critical review by a blog psychiatrist who denounced the work as `a primer on how to be a narcissist.' This struck me as accurate, but not as a valid criticism. The self absorbed characters coping with alienation from of their environment and the consequent dissatisfaction with everything the world offers up is this books strength. The novel describes a particular generation from a particular place and it does so unfalteringly.

Unforgettable!, 01 Aug 2007
A fast paced tale on bumming around america in the 40's music drugs girls and parties. Unforgettable characters and deep conversations that really hit home. Buy this book if you love the thought of getting up and just experiencing whats out there. Highly recommend!

Interesting Read, 01 Feb 2007
This book is a classic so I picked it up. I wouldn't consider myself a HUGE reader but I found this book a bit tough going at first.

The style of writing is that of someone from the beat poet generation who's on the road and bit lost, meaning that there are long sentences which extend right down the page, almost following one train of thought as if it has been written in a complete rant, which is important because he might have forgotten what he was gonna say and then when you least expect it, he'll deviate!!

You get my meaning.

It's an interesting read and I enjoyed it. Not a light book (not a very one either) but certainly one that captures the spirit of freedom and living your life in those uni/post university days/daze.

Someone to Wachowski me, 30 Dec 2007
I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term and then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" and it is also such a valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totally swept along.

On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived and executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through.

But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, and while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, and from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme and literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, and unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes all this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!).

There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initially forbidding, suddenly "clicks" and carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, and the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, and never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story.

Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily and fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, and even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, and appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was).

Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, and while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us.

Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint and fairly pointless when the internet we do know and love is constructed for its infinite flexibility and re-orderability - the data is just there, and you the user can use what tools you like to order and navigate it to your convenience.

They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down and disentangle Gibson's contorted prose and plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the bits that are different are all marked improvements.

Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, and on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary.

Olly Buxton

The alpha and omega of cyberpunk, 23 Oct 2007
In there beginning the was case, and wintermute saw case and it was good...
The alpha and omega of cyberpunk. This novel was a watershed, any novel of the genre that followed could not helped but be shaped by this superb book. Almost lyrical in style I can remember the moment I first cracked it's spine.

SF Noir...Poetic DreamScapes of a Dystopic Future..., 27 Sep 2007
I have read this masterpiece (together with the other two of the Sprawl series: COUNT ZERO and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE) during my university years, about a decade ago. Since then I have re-read it countless times. Even reading only some pages brings up powerful imagery, dark poetic language, unforgettable prose...

The strength of William Gibson, demonstrated here in full colors, is his ability to create the atmosphere and placing the reader in the middle of things. After reading these books of his, one has the feeling of actually having lived in the Sprawl in a past life!

Start with this one. Then COUNT ZERO. And finally MONA LISA OVERDRIVE.

A Masterpiece Trilogy!!! Own them all!!!

I had to read this book in English class, 02 Jun 2007
A fabulous read and a perfect masterpiece. I have read all of William Gibsons books. Some of his books inspired me to take on Computer Science and artificial intelligence, in particular, at university.
I would advise anyone that has an interest in science fiction, the internet, or anyone else to give it a read. It's a digital cowboy sort of novel which may take a while to gather thoughts from chapter to chapter, but if you are a keen reader you will come to grips with the complex storyline and the sheer simplicity with which it is written.

A science fiction masterwork, 16 Apr 2007
This is one of the most important books of the genre. Yes he got some things wrong - like the cost of Ram (but so did Bill Gates).

The book is something totally new and definitive. It lets you see the dark underside of a internet world. While there are flavours of Metropolis, describing how we deal with human computer interaction, it is mainly a thriller in a technological world.

Of no literary worth, 17 Jun 2008
Reviews are by nature subjective. That said, their should be a common element, an underlying current that runs through all reviews which peg the book (in this instance) at a similar level. That established, here I find myself rather baffled as to how anyone can either dredge or salvage anything from this book that would elevate it beyond a three star rating at maximum; there must be an element of consensus, because this book (or indeed any) has a basic content and structure, characters and plot that are capable of evaluation and critique. Let us call a spade a spade and not a shovel, this is a shovel!

I teach literature at university level and I am astounded how this book finds its way onto numerous 'must read' lists that appear on the internet and periodically in print. I can only imagine that the editors of such list either fail to read the entire content of said list, or they are simply keen to perpetuate the tired myths that unfortunately ensure largely worthless texts like this still make college reading lists. Either that or they simply read the dust jacket and go by the advertising copy; which according to the 'Vintage Classic' version I bought, sells this book as being, 'a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the old testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn'. Categorically is not, and I defy, nay challenge the publishers or indeed anyone to substantiate such a claim.

How ever you spin it, what ultimately transpires is that for any of the above reasons or others equally illogical, perfectly good texts - especially modern ones, are constantly ignored as white elephants like this go through their umpteenth re-print.

To get down to brass tacks, this book fails for a number of reasons, but amongst those I would cite the following five as being the major points of contention:
i) It is simply VERY boring indeed. A dull tale if ever one was told.
ii) The characters are neither well-established or particularly well-drawn. Faulkner's literary skills presented herein are neither worth of his acclaim nor his many accolades and awards.
iii) Structurally it is a simple narrative (not necessarily a problem), however, his language (except the odd regional accent) is unchallenging and unprovocative.
iv) It essentially fails to offer the reader anything. No new ideas, no philosophical insights, no social observations and no historical documentary per se. I think I picked out and highlighted about four sentences in the whole book, that I felt were interesting.
v) Finally, it fails to establish a new genre, a new mode of expression. Likewise it also fails to re-establish a current mode or extend and develop a literary style. In plain terms that means it belongs nowhere, has no recognisable nor definable style and yet fails to take new steps in establish a new genre; it is amateurish and unaccomplished.

The only plus point that one can give is the use of parallel narration that is quite interesting and mildly revolutionary. That said, the characters are not well enough established, nor well enough drawn as to make full use of this technique and so it simply adds confusion to the overall structure.

I cannot see one logical or justifiable reason why anyone should waste their time or their money in reading this text. Unless it is prescribed reading, in which case I would question the teachers motivations for electing this a a core or supplementary text. I think if you are studying American Literature, literature of death and dying, family structures etc. there are MUCH better books out there than this.

Dark Comedy and Psychological Realism, 02 Nov 2007
I just got thru reading As I Lay Dying for a college class. As I have read no other Faulkner, I cannot compare this with his other works. Although it takes time to get adjusted to it, the novel itself is grand, a tour de force as Faulkner called it. The family experiences Addie's loss.
Each character is fully realized, and every last one of them (in the family, anyway) is insane. Jewel is constantly cursing and using violence to express his love and anger. This is in direct relationship with his mother, because she did so with him. The very thing that defines him is when he calls his horse "You sweet son of a b----". That he how he relates to the world. He is a very angry young man, and cannot express himself properly without resorting to foul language.

Darl is a very interesting character. Although you may not catch it less you are paying attention, he has a telepathic ability, to read into people's mind. He is very perceptive. So perceptive, in fact, that in one chapter in the first part he describes what is happening at the house as Addie Bundren dies, and he and Jewel are away from the house selling materials. His relationship with Addie is strained at best. She loves Jewel best. In manner of speech, Addie and Darl are closest, being very poetic in speech.

Cash is 28/29 and Vardaman's age isn't given. He is a little boy. Cash makes the casket for his mother. Vardaman becomes very confused during the duration of the novel, because he catches a fish in the beginning. The fish dies and they eat it (this is a correlation of the family being like buzzards during the journey). One chapter consists of a single sentence. "My mother is a fish". It is also foreshadowing of one of the more comic events in the novel. Darl says of Jewel, whose relationship with his horse is based after his relationship with his mother, that his mother is a horse, speaking metaphorically. Vardaman takes that literally also. If Jewel's mother can be a horse, he insists his mother can be a fish.

Tull is the only sane one in the story, and he is not a member of the family. He is a neighbour who is helping with the family. Cora, his wife, serves God in a cliche way, and is generally niave. Brother Whitaker, without revealing too much of the plot, is important. Anse, the father, is hilarious. He says he cannot sweat because of some illness he got when he was 20. He won't do a damn thing. He won't be "beholden" to any man, which he says all the time. But he really doesn't want to do anything, and wants others to do it for him.

Dewey Dell is a very simple creature. She gets pregnant, and wants to have an abortion. She doesn't understand morality. Her intellect pales in comparison to Darl's; however, they have a psychic link together. Someone like this God would not judge harshly, because she does not have understanding.

Addie Bundren in the single most important character in the novel. Her chapter is a little past the center of the novel. The reason, one interpretation goes, is that Addie is like the spoke of a wheel, where the spoke is in the center, and everything is connected to it and comes out of it. She is a very hateful person. Although very poetic, she hates words, thinking them meaningless.

Sex to the Bundren family is not governed by morality (or at least they don't think it is). My teacher likened it to barnyard sex: animals are not governed by morality, and they just have sex. This is much the approach of this family, although of course they are wrong. Man is above animals, and morality governs this matter. Dewey Dell, of which much of the imagery associated with her is sexual, is very simple and knows nothing of sexual morality. Her name suggests her simpleton sexuality. Dewey Dell means "Moist Valley". Not to much of a stretch of an imagination to know what that means. She gets pregnant by Lafe. Dewey Dell is such of limited intelligence that she goes to the pharmacy at the end of the novel to get an abortion. The soda jerk tells her to come back, and then he has sex with her. She curses afterward, saying that won't cure anything. Darl and Cash masturbated while growing up. Addie is still lonely even though she has sexual relations with her husband, so goes elsewhere to find it. (Her children were there to cure her loneliness. An important lesson is lurking here: sex and children are two of the most precious gifts from God: they are exactly that - gifts. One must know Christ to have a truly fulfilled life).

Dark humour is very prevalent thruout the entire novel. Everything from Addie making her water trip to Anse getting those teeth to them dragging the body, stinking up everything, the novel is hilarious. Anse says he owes it to Addie to take her there, saying he won't disgrace her. Yet the whole journey is disgraceful. It is one of the funniest books in a dark sense that I have read in a long time. To speak to much of this would ruin some of the moments; but rest assured, if you properly imagine the events, it should strike you quite funny.

In conclusion, Faulkner has created a portrait dysfunctional family. He said he wrote this, and knew if he never picked up a pen again he would live or die (reputation wise) by this book. (Quote paraphrased) He also does his stream of conscious and multiple narrators, making this foray notable because of it. Each is fully drawn, with excellent psychological realism. The characterization is excellent. Read it.

Originally issued on Amazon.com May 15, 2000



Stream of consciousness written in Deep South vernacular. Phew!, 25 Sep 2007
Novels written in the vernacular can be problematic for the outsider. When they are additionally narrated in a pre-war stream of consciousness style and by a number of different individuals the difficulties are magnified. Of course, that is the point of the book: to convey the emotions and reactions of different members of a family about the same event; the event being the death of the southern matriarch Addie Bundren whose decaying body is transported far away to her home town for burial as she had requested. The journey consists of a series of grotesque and darkly humorous mishaps as relationships, disputes and bonds between family and neighbours are gradually revealed in around sixty extremely brief chapters of narration. It takes some unravelling and is really a question as to whether or not the reader feels it is all worthwhile. Maybe it is - just.

Stunning, 26 Jun 2007
A stunning piece of literature that keeps coming back to you with new thoughts and ideas. It definitely warrants more than one reading.

Pilgrim's Progress to the Promised Land, 05 Sep 2004
Faulkner's great accomplishment in this novel is to use the most modern fiction techniques to create a timeless allegory that we would probably not accept in a different style. His other great achievement is to leave so much space in the story for us to participate in adding meaning. You have to pay attention to even notice what is going on, and then you can provide a variety of interpretations. This novel will never be the same for any two readers. It is a stunning accomplishment, as a result.

The story begins as Addie Bundren lays dying, fanned by her daughter, while her son makes her coffin. With her husband and five children, we make her acquaintance by learning about their actions and characters. Only once does she have a role as a narrator, and then, quite late in the story.

Her husband, Anse, has promised her that he will bury her with her family. Because of tremendous rains, the river has risen, knocking out bridges and making passage difficult. Despite this, the family perseveres in taking her unembalmed body to the intended burial site. Along the way, there are many mishaps and the family is burdened in many ways by keeping this promise. As the burial comes closer, new elements of the story are exposed and develop that totally recast what you have thought was going on.

The story is a difficult one to read. So read this book when you have time to pay close attention and study the text word by word. Let me explain the difficulties you will encounter. First, the voices in the book use a Southern patois that will be unfamiliar to most. This is the language of the rural poor in the 1930s, which few have heard. Second, the exposition is mostly through thoughts, often expressed in fragmentary form, rather than through action and a smooth narrative. Third, the narration is a partial mosaic of impressions of the characters, jumping back and forth in 2-4 page segments. Their perceptions are partial, and even more partially expressed. Objectivity is shunned by Faulkner. Fourth, Faulkner wants you to fill in the gaps, and the best way to do that is to expose the gaps slowly. Only after 3 or 4 narrations by characters will the gaps begin to emerge in a way you can grasp them. Then, you still have to interpret them.

Few readers will miss the references to Moses and his search for the promised land, and the Christian parable of the Pilgrim's Progress. What is unstated is the connection to reading this book. Many poor Southern people of that time were taught to read with The Pilgrim's Progress as a primer. That experience helped to shape a perception and a sensibility that would influence their actions, and thus, this tale. That connection creates a wonderful series of circles here that build on one another.

At bottom though, it is clear from this book that there are secrets of the heart that are never exposed in public. When we come close to dying (our own or someone else's), these secrets begin to rise closer to the surface where we (and sometimes others) can see them.

Faulkner has one quirk in the book that I urge you to look for. While he is often conveying the thoughts of uneducated people, he will drop in magnificent phrases that are worthy of Shakespeare. He wants you to know that he is a learned man, hiding behind his humble bards. That pride creates flaws in the book, but flaws that are a delight to the reader, nevertheless. In fact, he takes this one step further by employing many of Shakespeare's favorite techniques from foreshadowing through nature's fury through using fools.

After you have read this book, I encourage you to consider what secret desires, actions, fears, and thoughts you have which you keep buried even from yourself. Then consider the potential benefits of making these known, before you lay dying.

Also, whenever things seem confused, consider how others may be perceiving what is going on. Like Vardeman, they too may think their mother is a fish. Accept their view of reality, and communicate in terms of that perception if you want to make contact. Otherwise, you will be alone even in the middle of your family, as the Bundrens were in As I Lay Dying.

Enjoy this American masterpiece! I think you'll find it irresistible and moving.

I hope I'm not thick, 05 Aug 2008
I think I'm a pretty bright sort of a bloke. I got a good degree in English Literature from a very respectable university. I'm pretty knowledgable and can grasp fairly difficult concepts. But I'm not ashamed to admit (I am ashamed really) that this book floored me.

I appreciate it is experimental and understand that it probably gives great pleasure to those who "get" what Ballard is doing. But it is extremely obscure, written in a highly-florid, conceptual style and I found it unreadable. Instead of becoming involved with it I ended up just looking at words on a page and although I could appreciate the semantics of each sentence, getting any kind of notion of what was happening across the novel escaped me.

So should you be considering purchasing the book my advice would be this: If you like poetry you might like this. If you enjoy the deciphering of poetry, enjoy the subtext and enjoy the playing with ideas and forms of literature, then you might like this. Otherwise, you probably won't.

I have not read any other books by this author but do intend to. I hope that The Atrocity Exhibition was just very self-indulgent on his part and that I do not waste another eight quid on my next Ballard.

The 'atrocious' exhibition, 05 Jan 2006
'The Atrocity Exhibition' is a very apt title, because I have never read a more atrocious book. 'Experimental' translated means 'Avant-Garde', He mentions rape, torture, paedophilia, people who are aroused by Vietnam's child napalm victims and people who are aroused by viewing car crashes. As if this weren't bad enough, he writes the book in a willfully obscure, difficult, awkward style - hence the 'experimental' label.

Essentially what Ballard is trying to do is dazzle us with his expansive vocabulary, but it cannot change the fact that the novel is meaningless. I for one am not impressed by someone who uses ten-syllable words continuously.

Barely a paragraph goes by where he isn't making some crude or unpleasant outlandish sexual reference, even to the point where he is implying that anyone who is an anti-war protestor is sexually inadequate. There are numerous of these bizarre and disturbing thoughts.

I fail to see how anyone could 'enjoy' this novel, as it is not the kind of novel you can enjoy. Once you have come to terms with his style of writing, the novel just becomes tedious. I do not think there is an overall point. Avoid this obscene and tedious novel at ALL costs!

Truly visionary, 03 Oct 2005
Will Self describes this book, on the cover, as representing "the zenith of the experimental novel in English. Ballard's marginalia are a tour de force, a wholy original work in their own right."

This annotated edition with an excellent introduction by William Burroughs and Ballard's own chapter notes, written with over twenty years hindsight, further enhances a novel that already made Ballard stand out as one of greatest soothsayers of the twentieth century.

Obsessively documenting his obsessions and preoccupations, this novel cuts deep into the fabric of contemporary society. Not an easy read but an invaluable testament of our time, now with added historic perspective.

Every good novel should change your life - this will alter your perceptions in an astonishing and radical manner. Not to be missed.

Best book I ever read!, 30 Aug 2005
Yes, this is a difficult and complex book. Yes, it is dense, cryptic and multi-layered. Yes, it lacks a clear linear plot. Yes, it is packed with complex and repetitive images. It is also Ballard's finest work, a collection of frames from a film that evokes all the obsessions and symbols of the latter years of the twentieth century.
And to answer the last reviewer, yes, I think it is great.

amazing - the geometry of virtual un-reality, 28 Aug 2005
ballard himself said that every paragraph of this frightening, obscure and obtuse puzzle-fiction is a condensed novel. it's true and puts most other writers to shame: experimental and totally transgressive.
the imagination and wayward-intelligence behind the ideas here might lead you to think it was written by an maverick escapee of a mental asylum (maybe travis, trabert, talbolt or traven)but ballard, like orwell and huxley, knows exactly what he's talking about.
there's abandoned airfields where recreations of the jfk assassination take place, studies of the geometry of bits of car in relation to calculated sexual poses, the encyclopedia of imaginary diseases, dali, max ernst, the death-crashes of james dean, albert camus.
first published as a collected 'novel' in 1969 it embodies the start/end of the space race, psychopathology of the modern icon and the possibilities of celebrity car-death.
the annotations by ballard in this edition are very helpful in creating an understanding of some of the less obvious content without detracting from the ferocity of the ideas.
'atrocity exhibition' is the only title this book could possibly have.

tough read, 01 Apr 2007
This book will take you from horror to blandness in the turn of a page. It is possibly one of the hardest books I've ever read, but in turn one of the most well constructed. Obviously some reviewers on Amazon consider the writing poor, as well as the structure, but it seems like they have not just missed the point of the books structure, more like taken a thousand mile detour around it. It's a brave book and Ellis deserves praise for his uncompromising approach in every area of the storyline. I must admit I found it more than I could handle, more than I could take in. However as a satire on a self-obsessed, shallow and money orientated society it is flawless.

Better than the film..., 02 Mar 2007
I'd seen the film already and had been intrigued as everyone said the film was incredibly graphic, but I didn't find it all that viscerally visual, although I'd been told the book was more descriptive in its violent scenes. This was absolutely correct.

From the outset, Patrick Bateman is a meticulous person who obsessively lists a person's attributes - in his world, a person's job, possessions, politics and how he presents himself is who he is. He's a mass of contradictions, expressed both in his politics and his lifestyle, for example, he takes good care of himself, exercises regularly, has a rigid skincare regime and worries about such things as the sodium content of soy sauce, yet takes drugs at every opportunity.

In typical "serial killer" style, he is repeatedly described as "the boy next door", despite the fact that he continually tries to convince people otherwise, even whispering under his breath, "No I'm not, I'm a fucking evil psychopath," almost as if his murderous impulses are caused by his desire to distinguish himself from others (who all seem to be identikit versions of the stereotypical yuppie and are continually mistaken for each other - they are interchangeable non-entities).

Bateman is primarily a visually stimulated person, whether it's taking note of the minute differences between the various business cards, or getting off on a scene in a movie where a woman is drilled to death. He seems to be a stickler for time - he is almost reduced to tears when he thinks he and his colleagues won't get a good seat in the restaurant due to taking so long to decide on a destination. I found I could empathise with him on this aspect of his character, as I often get very frustrated when trying to arrange something like that although I promise I'm not a psychopathic killer!)

A man of extremes, Bateman has a very short fuse over the most inane things (such as pizza), yet can instantly switch back to a calm, commanding persona, resuming control of a situation. His appeal is quite disturbing - I found myself, on occasion, actually liking him, despite his homicidal tendencies, and loved that he was so brazen and bold in taking his bloodied sheets and clothes to a cleaner.

The mention that he reads the biographies of serial killers wouldn't ordinarily cause concern, but in this case, knowing that he's psychotically violent, it's rather disturbing that he admires them so much and is emulating, possibly trying to surpass, them. He also objectifies women (referring to them as "hardbodies" - as do all his friends), keeping them anonymous.

There's an interesting section near the end (don't worry, I won't divulge any major plot details) where Bateman briefly refers to himself in the third person which is rather surreal - he really is losing the plot at that point. I also wonder how much of the narrative only takes place inside his drug-crazed mind, and how much actually happens.

This was a very interesting read and I rather enjoyed parts of this descent into utter psychotic madness...

Better than the film, sometimes quite bizarre, 29 Jan 2007
Okay so it is better than the film, the books usually are, it is packed with extra happenings which are well described. I must admit to finding it a little hard to follow, perhaps it was the writing style. However if you're into a little gore this book is for you, you'll enjoy it.

So misunderstood that it's comical., 15 Dec 2006
'American Psycho' is, above anything else, a post-modern novel about the problems with post-modernism. I feel like I should address one particular issue, or I could go on for pages. Does Bateman actually murder anyone; how much of his life is a fantasy? Every review I have read here seems to suggest that he either DID or DID NOT commit these acts. However, this is to miss the point entirely. Easton Ellis has clearly read 'L'etranger' and 'Notes from Underground' because the existential subtext is clear. On a rudimentary level, it can be said the the existential philosophy refuses to accept any objective 'truth'. The only 'truth' is that of individual experience. Thus Bateman's description of murder and rape cannot be presumed to be either true or false. Patrick has depersonalised himself, in the existential style, in order to find a way of dealing with the horror of eighties corporate and social materialism. He is a 'noncontingent human being' - utterly without a personality. Thus he 'absorbs' all that is around him - he IS the eighties. Nothing is solved at the end of the book because he refuses to give in to any spiritual enlightenment, such is the extent of his perdition. Hence 'THIS IS NOT AN EXIT'. I'll leave it there; suffice to say that to argue over whether the protagonist actually murdered anyone, or bought anything, or went to any fancy restaurants ... is totally besides the point.

Laugh till you cry, 20 Aug 2006
Yes, it's gratuitously violent and disgusting, yadda, yadda, yadda. But 'American Psycho' is also one of the funniest and most brilliant works of satire you will every read. I laughed so much and so loud I startled people on planes.

Dissects the dark underbelly of New York capitalism in the 1990s just as sharply as Bateman's knife. A true classic from the first word to the last.