In the early '70s, British author J.G. Ballard concluded a trilogy of urban novels (Crash and Concrete Island were the first two) with the chillingly prescient High-Rise, a vision of domestic utopia unhinged by its own technology and artifice. Set in a sleek and self-contained skyscraper that provides its residents with every imaginable amenity, the story evolves into a modern Lord Of The Flies, with class conflicts erupting floor-by-floor in a literal struggle to get to the top. Thirty years later, Ballard's point of view hasn't changed, so much as it's adapted to a new set of conditions that currently pass for human advancement. Inspired in part by a personal survey of real French office parks, Ballard's darkly comic and profoundly sinister thriller Super-Cannes opens up the hermetic world of High-Rise to the neatly manicured playgrounds of corporate culture. A planned community nestled on the Côte d'Azur, Eden-Olympia—the evocative name says it all—was designed as an executive's paradise, a safe and secluded home for monolithic multinationals and the social elite that run them. Residents live in spacious villas with swimming pools and a placid lakefront, without having to worry about crime or even health problems, which are monitored by the health data (blood pressure, pulse, weight, and so on) they need to register every morning. But Eden's peerless reputation suffered a blow when David Greenwood, a pediatrician known for his pleasant temperament and charitable nature, gunned down 10 people, including himself, in a shooting spree. As the novel opens, Greenwood's replacement, Jane Sinclair, moves into his old residence with her husband Paul, a former aviator who recently lost his license (and his kneecap) in a botched takeoff. Driven by boredom, curiosity, and a hint of jealousy over Jane's past romantic ties to Greenwood, Paul snoops around, looking for reasons why such a seemingly good-natured man would commit such an unimaginable atrocity. All roads lead to the suspicious Wilder Penrose, a messianic psychiatrist who lords over Eden-Olympia with diabolical therapies that harness his patients' aggression and keep them working with maximum productivity. But, as in Ballard's other work, human emotions can't be so easily controlled, and repressed feelings can resurface in horribly mutated and destructive ways. A surrealist at heart, Ballard lives for those moments when natural and unnatural worlds come together to form a new landscape that's twisted, unstable, and sometimes oddly beautiful. At nearly 400 pages, Super-Cannes is too loose in its plot mechanics to match the taut, diamond-sharp efficiency of Crash or High-Rise. Paul's slow deterioration from a man searching for Greenwood to a man becoming more like Greenwood is perhaps a little too neat psychologically. But when Ballard sets his imagination to a corporate wonderland run amok, where effete executives are turned into fascist thugs and secret perversions lurk behind every door, Super-Cannes skewers its target with a chilly elegance that's unmistakably his own.