“I don't endorse everything that happens in either the novel or the film of Crash,” was author JG Ballard's spin on the content of his most controversial book and David Cronenberg's movie adaptation. "But both are cautionary tales...”

JG Ballard's '60s and '70s home life may have been that of a “rather sober figure ... bringing up three children, with a golden retriever and a cat” but the world inside his head was much darker.

A scribbler of bleak and challenging sci-fi tales, Ballard had already swirled up controversy with his short story collection The Atrocity Exhibition and organised a presentation of smashed car wrecks  - called simply 'Crashed Cars' – as disturbingly sexual images. But it took 1973's Crash to fully work out his obsession with the erotic potential of road accidents.

The book is an account of a man's growing fascination with car crashes and the victims of car crashes, where sex and suffering, twisted metal and twisted bodies intertwine. And yes, where a man has sex with a whacking great scar on a woman's leg. “Cautionary tale”? Yeah, definitely. Filmable? Most sane people thought not...