Ballard's experimental stories "delighted" Moorcock: "['The Assassination Weapon'] was exactly what I'd been looking for [...] For me it was exemplary, a flag to wave for authors and readers.

Ambit went on to publish "You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe" and "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race", also in 1966.

[5] The Atrocity Exhibition is split up into sections, similar to the style of William S. Burroughs, a writer whom Ballard admired.

There is no clear beginning or end to the book, and it does not follow any of the conventional novelistic standards: the protagonist changes name with each chapter or story (Talbert, Traven, Travis, Talbot, etc.

Traven tries to make sense of the many public events that dominate his world (the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Space Race, Elizabeth Taylor's much-publicized tracheotomy, and especially the assassination of John F. Kennedy), by restaging them in ways that, to his psychotic mind, gives them a more personal meaning.

He travels with a Marilyn Monroe scorched by radiation burns, and with a bomber-pilot of whom he notes that "the planes of his face did not seem to intersect correctly."