Status Updates From Reports from the Deep End: ...

During his last weeks, Braun’s mania became increasingly disordered. The clear equation he had made between sex, walking and kinesthesia related in some incomprehensible way to his obsession with Olivia Colman.

On one occasion we met at the bus station, and I noticed that his hiking boots smelled of dubbin and rectal mucus. Nearby there was a photographic exhibition of crash test dummies and botched plastic surgery, but we decided to go to the walking stick museum instead.

…Also, it’s meant to look like eco-tourism. Green holidays for people who can fly four thousand miles to reduce their carbon footprint.”

“The rumour that certain female shoppers were circulating a pamphlet titled “Why I Want Donald Trump to Fuck Himself” remains unconfirmed even as a rumour.”

“Ballard’s got this sicko fascination with cars. He’s got a whole fleet of them up there, rentals or some snazzy models borrowed from people. And I’m supposed to—”
Here Lori Nelson paused and blushed.
“Supposed to what?”
“I’m supposed to make love to this Austin-Healey convertible. …..

………… Nobody even knows what the monster looks like yet! Ballard just keeps saying, ‘It derives its essence from inner space.’”

It distracted him from a certain echoing loneliness that he otherwise would have had to pay attention to – not so much a personal loneliness, as he experienced it, but something more general, the loneliness of space and time, or even of the universe itself, faced with the inescapable fact of its own existence.

His grey, cadaverous appearance made him a living embodiment of deadline stress.

Absolutely indulging myself with this volume, that is unerringly Ballardian in tone so far!