J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel, Crash, with its portrayal of an intense and harrowing subculture that fetishizes car crashes -- the gorier the better -- is probably one the most widely misinterpreted works of 20th-century fiction. Most readers and reviewers focus (understandably) on the ostensible and much-discussed "disturbing eroticism" of the book when, in fact, Ballard was less interested in the purely sexual aspect of the work than in the deeper philosophical and moral ramifications of the tale--namely, technology's power over our fantasies, and how we as humans react to catastrophe and remain sane and whole in a brutal world.

Crash, Ballard wrote in an introduction to one edition of the book, is "an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our psychopathologies?"

Keeping Ballard's own intentions in mind, Rick Pynor (founding editor of Eye magazine and co-founder of designobserver.com) recently published a piece called "Collapsing Bulkheads" on Ballardian.com, in which he offers up a slew of cover images from various editions of the book, along with some observations on the cover art elicited from Ballard himself.

For example, commenting on the 1973 edition shown here, with the huge, hideous gear shift phallically waving against a silly, monumental background, Ballard says that it's "monstrously bad, one of the worst book jackets ever -- for sheer ugliness and crudity, it's impossible to beat." But of the other image, Chris Foss's 1975 cover for Panther Books, Ballard observes that the imagery is "superb, in many ways the best ever. Quasi-realistic, but in the right way, like a movie poster of the 1950s -- brought into brilliant focus by that line -- 'A brutal, erotic novel'."

Of the image from the Livre de Poche edition (top) with the car sprouting a red, fleshy tongue that leeringly licks a woman's naked body, Poynor notes that the "tacky" cover "turns the vehicle itself into the protagonist and misses the point."

Do yourself a favor -- whether you care about Ballard's heady intentions or not, and even if you've never read the book or seen the movie, check out Poynor's piece. If nothing else, it's got some dynamite pictures of some pretty gnarly car crashes, and some of the cooler book covers you're likely to see any time soon.

--BEN COSGROVE

Noonday Press edition of Crash, 1994; design: Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden