The main character of this novel, named Ballard, leads a marriage reduced to empty sexuality. After a car accident, he and his wife Catherine come into contact with a circle surrounding the accident fetishist Dr. Robert Vaughan, a former media scholar who is convinced that car accidents release untapped sexual energies. After Vaughan's greatest dream of dying in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor fails, Ballard pursues his mission with the rest of the group in increasingly extreme accident projects. J.G. Ballard's masterful parable on the death drive of technological progress amalgamates mass individualism with perverse sexual encounters. Far from losing relevance in the age of the internet and electric mobility, Ballard's excessive fiction and cold analysis form a key text.