A dead bird’s dusty wings imprinted on that bedroom glass forever.

The Marigold is the story of a city consuming itself, a toxic, sentient mold spreading through the condo towers of Toronto, taunting its residents with their deepest fears, drawing out their loneliness and insecurities, letting them stew in condo units already starting to show the wear-and-tear inherent to our day-to-day existence, the parts of life that do not appear in the brochure or the animated walk-through on the real estate agent’s website. My own experiment in exploring the boundaries of vertical living, The Marigold, literalizes much of the ongoing dread suffused through each floor of Ballard’s building. You can’t write a novel about a tower without a nod toward High-Rise. Yet High-Rise remains a singular invocation, summoning a sturdy mental image with ease, a fraught zoo, a series of stacked cages, a social order imprinted on the quivering skyline in concrete-a book that has shaped its legacy at times with just a title and a stark image on the cover. Novels like Super-Cannes, Concrete Island, and Cocaine Nights all invoke similar themes of alienation, isolation, and unrestrained affluence from the depths of his back catalogue, the rich coiling tightly around one another to block out the pressing realities of the wider, poorer world. In the past few decades, its potency has come closer to resembling prophecy, yet Ballard’s obsession with affluence and self-isolating communities isn’t limited to this novel alone.

Ballard’s modern fable High-Rise is almost fifty years old.

High rise by jg ballard