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Feral Architecture: Ballardian Horrors
J.G. Ballard has held a tremendous influence on culture since he first started writing, much of which turned out to be prophetic. In Feral Architecture Joe Koch, Donyae Coles, Sara Century, Brendan Vidito, and editor Sam Richard plume the depth of that influence through the lens of horror fiction.
The results are surreal, ominous, unexpected, unnerving, and a fitting tribute to the legacy of one of the 20th century’s most impactful and important writers.
Featuring a foreword by Scott Dwyer of The Plutonian.
The results are surreal, ominous, unexpected, unnerving, and a fitting tribute to the legacy of one of the 20th century’s most impactful and important writers.
Featuring a foreword by Scott Dwyer of The Plutonian.
126 pages, Paperback
First published December 18, 2023
4 people are currently reading
78 people want to read
About the author
Sam Richard
44 books108 followersSam Richard is the author of several books including The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God and the award-winning To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows. He has edited ten anthologies, including the cult hits Profane Altars: Weird Sword & Sorcery and The New Flesh, and his short fiction has appeared in over forty publications. Widowed in 2017, he slowly rots in Minneapolis where he runs Weirdpunk Books. You can stalk him @SammyTotep across most socials or at weirdpunkbooks.com
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 7, 2025
"Our perfect, precise A.I. directed bombs only ever hit their intended targets who are always evil and against us and our allies and what we all stand for. And when they die, they are wiped from the earth like bleach to bacteria, not in a shower of rubble and shrapnel and rockets that shoot out literal knives that sever children's spines at weddings, but in a perfectly ordered way that leaves no trace behind because there's a movie you should see and a new laptop you need and are your erections hard enough and how's your testosterone level and didn't this celebrity do something crazy recently?"
April 8, 2025
A neat collection of weird horror from one of my favorite indie publishers. It’s less gory than some of Weirdpunk’s other titles, but no less disturbing, in surreal, off-putting, liminal stories
August 5, 2025
A-/A
I’m generally a sucker for all things Ballardian so I was super excited when I came across this book and I picked it up ASAP. It (mostly) delivers on what it promises its readers: short stories in the Ballardian mode.
The first and last stories in the collection were probably my favorites. The first reads like a fucked up mixture of The Atrocity Exhibition with The Drought and The Drowned World (!); it is hallucinogenic and nearly awe-inspiring in how it threads different narrative strands together. And the last story… I could definitely see someone calling it, “too on the nose” especially with… gestures widely at everything… going on, but it states things that Ballard only ever implied and is all the stronger for that.
The only story that felt out of place was the middle story. It definitely wasn’t bad but it read to me more like an episode of Love, Death, and Robots than anything I’ve read by Ballard, but, that being said, I haven’t read literally everything by Ballard (and there’s a lot of short stories I haven’t read in particular), so what do I know?
If anything this collection is too short… I was left wanting more. But… what is in there deserves the attention of fans of Ballard, psychogeography, weird fiction, sci-fi, and horror. I picked up a few other books by the publisher as well and I hope to get to them soon.
I’m generally a sucker for all things Ballardian so I was super excited when I came across this book and I picked it up ASAP. It (mostly) delivers on what it promises its readers: short stories in the Ballardian mode.
The first and last stories in the collection were probably my favorites. The first reads like a fucked up mixture of The Atrocity Exhibition with The Drought and The Drowned World (!); it is hallucinogenic and nearly awe-inspiring in how it threads different narrative strands together. And the last story… I could definitely see someone calling it, “too on the nose” especially with… gestures widely at everything… going on, but it states things that Ballard only ever implied and is all the stronger for that.
The only story that felt out of place was the middle story. It definitely wasn’t bad but it read to me more like an episode of Love, Death, and Robots than anything I’ve read by Ballard, but, that being said, I haven’t read literally everything by Ballard (and there’s a lot of short stories I haven’t read in particular), so what do I know?
If anything this collection is too short… I was left wanting more. But… what is in there deserves the attention of fans of Ballard, psychogeography, weird fiction, sci-fi, and horror. I picked up a few other books by the publisher as well and I hope to get to them soon.
February 16, 2024
Notes from a Decaying Millennial:
I Received this book as part of the Weird Punk Books 2024 SubClub
This is an age of wide-spread connection, visual, digital. We engage with, communicate with people from all over the globe. This all sounds amazing, mind expanding ..The Reality of it all is often far different. The desire for person to person connection, face to face, flesh to flesh, has simply increased in intensity and severity. Edited by Sam Richards, Feral Architecture is a collection of stories by a handful of authors who, each in their own way, re-awaken the reader in 2024, to the horrific truths of the world of now as set down By J.G. Ballard. Lovers who come together in that most intimate of ways, but who are each isolated and seeking connection. Living specters haunting the endless miles of concrete, steel and microplastics that is the geography of
our Anthropocene landscape in the 21st century.
Body Horror owes much to Ballard, his writings are the yellowed bones of this sub-genre many of us have come to cherish so deeply. Together, Joe Koch, Brendan Vidito, Donyae Coles, Sara Century and Sam Richards remind the reader that Body-Horror is much more than extra eye-balls and pulpy growths. It's the body of the urban environment, the body of the digital sphere. The disquieting, ghastly and strangely erotic ways these bodies, and our own miniscule bits of flesh, interact and merge with each other.
I Received this book as part of the Weird Punk Books 2024 SubClub
This is an age of wide-spread connection, visual, digital. We engage with, communicate with people from all over the globe. This all sounds amazing, mind expanding ..The Reality of it all is often far different. The desire for person to person connection, face to face, flesh to flesh, has simply increased in intensity and severity. Edited by Sam Richards, Feral Architecture is a collection of stories by a handful of authors who, each in their own way, re-awaken the reader in 2024, to the horrific truths of the world of now as set down By J.G. Ballard. Lovers who come together in that most intimate of ways, but who are each isolated and seeking connection. Living specters haunting the endless miles of concrete, steel and microplastics that is the geography of
our Anthropocene landscape in the 21st century.
Body Horror owes much to Ballard, his writings are the yellowed bones of this sub-genre many of us have come to cherish so deeply. Together, Joe Koch, Brendan Vidito, Donyae Coles, Sara Century and Sam Richards remind the reader that Body-Horror is much more than extra eye-balls and pulpy growths. It's the body of the urban environment, the body of the digital sphere. The disquieting, ghastly and strangely erotic ways these bodies, and our own miniscule bits of flesh, interact and merge with each other.
July 19, 2024
An uneven assortment of ambiguous grotesques. The tribute to Ballard is a cool idea but there should only ever be one of him.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews