By the novel’s end, the building’s “well-to-do professionals” have devolved into “rival clans,” the 25th-floor doctor revels in an incestuous relationship with his sister, and the tenth-floor swimming pool is littered with “skulls, bones, and dismembered limbs.”
An Afghan Hound is drowned and a white Alsatian roasted with garlic and herbs, both symbolic acts carried out by residents of the lower floors against the elites living in the higher-level units. In both versions, violent undercurrents surface in a newly-built residential tower, and as class hostilities grow, house pets become the first and last casualties of the disintegrating social order. Ballard’s cautionary tale of Modernism was recently adapted for the screen by director Ben Wheatley, and while the film version proves the story’s continued relevance, it fails to live up to the book’s perverse detail. Not long after, a man known only as the jeweler crashes down into the parking lot.
First a champagne bottle falls from one of the upper levels of the 40-floor apartment building “coloniz(ing) the sky,” where British sci-fi punk J.G.
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