Crash (1973) was directly inspired by an homonymous ‘condensed novel’ of The Atrocity Exhibition and, in many ways, appears as a linearized, and more accessible, sequel to what was until then Ballard's most radically experimental work. The story takes place in contemporary London. A narrator named James Ballard reports on how his own automobile crash – in which a passenger from the other car is fatally injured – triggers in him a number of compelling obsessions, all of which gravitate around the ‘perverse eroticism of the car-crash, as painful as the drawing of an exposed organ through the aperture of a surgical wound’ (C. 17). As Ballard becomes aware of his new state of consciousness, he also becomes increasingly unsatisfied with his familiar concrete and emotional surroundings. His relationship with his wife, in particular, has become ‘almost totally abstracted, maintained by a series of imaginary games and perversities’ (C. 83). Most prominent among these is the daily ritual of describing to each other their recent and future infidelities while having sexual intercourse. These vicarious fantasies, however, soon prove unsatisfying after the accident has shattered Ballard's previous sense of self and become a catalyst for the emergence of a number of as-yet unimagined pleasures that would give a new meaning to his blunted personality and transcend ‘all the hopes and fancies of [his] suburban enclave, drenched in a thousand infidelities’ (C. 49).