J.G. Ballard: High-Rise. Ballard is unique among 20th century British novelists. In each of his dystopian/fantasy tales (Nabokov would have called them romances) he creates a self-destroying world unto itself with its own odd rules and twisted realities. "High-Rise" is Ballard at his best, combining his early, edgy, pulp weather stories with his mature, late period style. Here he turns William Golding's fall-of-man morality tale on its head and ends up in the same fly-lord jungle. Mankind crawls from the primordial ooze to the sleak and shiny modernist tower of steel where he is a cartoon caveman in a post-postmod nightmare, dragging his woman by the hair, waving his club in the air, being all that he can be.