The Atrocity Exhibition

The irrational violence of the modern world is the subject of this strange and disturbing book. The central character is a doctor who is suffering from a nervous breakdown. His dreams are haunted by the figures of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and auto-disaster victims.Trying to find his sanity, he casts himself in a number of different roles - H-Bomber pilot, presidential assassin, car-crash victim, psychopath. He is obsessed with the deaths, among others, of Kennedy and Oswald, seeing them as models of his own self-destruction. Escaping from the hospital where he works, he sets out to restage their deaths in a way that will make sense, using whatever materials come to hand - the body of an enigmatic and beautiful young woman who gives him a lift along a freeway; an abandoned weapons-testing ground; the immoral inhabitants of a decadent beach resort. Everything around him seems sterile and perverted, but with the magic of violence he at last finds the key to a new sexuality.For the hero, nightmare and reality overlap, and the story is seen through a number of lenses, sometimes with the harshness of a documentary filmed in a mental slaughterhouse, at other times with the calm and clinical detachment of a scientific report. Together they show a world controlled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. The Atrocity Exhibition is a unique and disturbing newsreel of our unconscious minds.