Concrete Island pays twisted homage to Defoe''s Robinson Crusoe. Newly reissued with an introduction from Neil Gaiman.
On a day in April, just after three o''clock in the afternoon, Robert Maitland''s car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the island below, where he is injured and, finally, trapped. What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament soon turns into horror as Maitland-a wickedly modern Robinson Crusoe-realizes that, despite evidence of other inhabitants, this doomed terrain has become a mirror of his own mind. Seeking the dark outer rim of the everyday, Ballard weaves private catastrophe into an intensely specular allegory.
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