I picked up J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes to read for a book club run by Archestratus Books that I couldn’t actually attend. (Head, meet desk.) Still: good lord, what a novel.

Stating the obvious here: Ballard’s a massive figure in my own personal canon, and I keep finding myself floored by his work in new and different ways. (The Unlimited Dream Company is a relatively recent entry in this category.) Initially, Super-Cannes read like a late-career revisiting of some of Ballard’s older work: I can see traces here of Crash, of High-Rise, of Concrete Island.

But in telling the story of a middle-aged man who moves to an ultra-modern corporate community when his doctor wife takes a job there, Ballard quickly sheds any sense of nostalgia for something much more haunting and altogether nastier.

It anticipates everything from mass shootings to the “manosphere,” but it also represents something of an evolution of Ballard’s own handling of his work. Ballard’s protagonists are often detached and a little aloof, which largely works in the context of the stories being told; here, narrator Paul has these qualities in abundance, but there’s also a sense that he’s….not unreliable as such, but that that detachment makes him a little less aware of the bigger picture than he probably should be.

There’s a bit of film noir in the narrative here, and a bit of paranoid thriller in its DNA as well. He’d only publish two more novels in his lifetime; it’s a little thrilling to see that, even at this late point in his career, he was still pushing around the edges and experimenting.