I’ve been reading J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), a brutalist fever dream dressed in concrete and ennui. It’s a story that doesn’t so much depict a descent into chaos as suggest that chaos is the natural state, politely waiting in the wings until the lift stops working and someone pees in the pool.
This isn’t horror in the Stephen King sense—there’s no room 1408 here, no haunted sheets or malevolent chandeliers. The building isn’t animated; it’s engineered. But like all great systems, it doesn’t need a soul to kill you. The real haunting, as ever, is society itself. Ballard simply does away with the need for ghosts and lets architecture and aspiration do the dirty work.
Compared to Crash—where characters make love to car crashes and each other with equal mechanical indifference—High-Rise has something resembling a cast. I say “resembling” because these aren’t people so much as archetypes on a descent escalator. There’s Laing, a kind of blank-eyed anthropologist; Wilder, who mistakes brute force for authenticity; and Royal, the man literally living in a penthouse and metaphorically in a delusion.
Do I care about them? Not in the slightest. But that might be Ballard’s point. Their motivations are as shallow as a puddle in the car park after the water’s been shut off. Much of the action feels contrived, like a staged rehearsal for an apocalypse that already happened.
And yet—isn’t that precisely what society is? A tepid soup of extrinsic motivators dressed up in motivational posters and mission statements. Nobody in the high-rise acts out of depth or conviction. They act because someone else did it first, because no one told them not to, or because the lift only goes so far down and what else is there to do?
If Crash explored the eroticism of the machine, High-Rise explores the nihilism of comfort. Ballard’s thesis seems to be that civilisation is little more than a thin laminate over our baser instincts—and once it peels, there’s nothing underneath but turf wars and brand loyalty to floor numbers.
The modern reader might recognise the high-rise in everything from gated communities to Meta’s metaverse: sanitised, stratified, severed from consequence. A self-cleaning coffin of convenience.
And, as in the United States today, it all comes heavily medicated and prettily lit—with lipstick, meet pig.
Ridley Park 