Pete Ward
@phenryward.bsky.social
618 followers 1.4K following 866 posts
Books, art, theatre, telling people I liked the thing they made. Weird / Gothic / Noir short stories published or forthcoming in Rock and a Hard Place, Cosmic Horror, Macabre, Frost Zone, Rat Bag and elsewhere. Editorial reader at Gavagai.
![A demented and strangely beautiful passage in J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash comes to mind, a few sentences in which spectators at a multi-car wreck watch the “deformed vehicles” more than the human victims. Ballard’s narrator wonders if these witnesses “saw within [the deformed cars] the model for their own future lives.” CarJitsu falls short of Ballard’s portrait of ecstasy and transcendence, to say the least, but it does imply a certain tryhard yearning, like it wants to recreate in another venue the carnage associated with motor vehicles. Do the crash inside the car perhaps, rather than out. Making the seatbelt unsafe again does constitute, after all, the philosophy at work here.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:sjmmpal2hdymm6in3hoeh3jg/bafkreidin2d7u5okjkesdplp6cl3muln4iwoouiwmmkjs3hr46e7vpm5hm)
