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Bret Easton Ellis writes violent literature. His infamous novel “American Psycho” features one of literature’s most infamous serial killers, Patrick Bateman, and was famously canceled by Simon & Schuster months before it was to be sent to the printers, citing “aesthetic differences over what critics had termed its violent and women-hating content.”
It was not the author’s first encounter with the macabre. In “Less Than Zero,” the only thing that delights his disillusioned characters is a snuff film; “Glamorama” features a group of models turned terrorists. And “The Informers” has murder and suicide, castration and corpse mutilation, as well as blood consumption during intercourse.
Ellis’ most recent novel, “The Shards,” is a “fictional memoir” of his senior year of high school. The novel takes place in 1980s Los Angeles, complete with BMW automobiles, Wayfarer sunglasses, New Wave music, and collars with pops. Its protagonist is “Bret,” a senior at The Buckley School who is writing “Less Than Zero” – Ellis’ real name, high school, and bold debut novel. A serial killer known as The Trawler is prowling Los Angeles against this backdrop of parties and privilege. A statue on the Buckley campus has been damaged by the decapitated fish heads from the school koi pond. Pets in the neighborhood go missing before their mangled remains are discovered. Women begin to vanish before their terribly deformed bodies are discovered.
Ellis’ most recent novel, “The Shards,” is a “fictional memoir” of his senior year of high school.
“Bret” spends his time in a mindless loop of drinking vodka, popping Valium, and having sex with whoever of his gorgeous classmates (male or female) is in the mood. Behind thick veneers, all the jaded pupils exist. “Bret” explains that when a photographer aimed a camera at them, “no one really posed, because we were already posing.”
Soon, Buckley’s students will also be attacked and murdered. Bret becomes obsessed with the crime spree and its perpetrator. Is it Robert Mallory, Buckley’s breathtakingly gorgeous new student, who appears to be lying about his past? That are the individuals who worship at the shrine of Mallory’s beauty? Or someone even more intimate with the narrator? A classmate asked “Bret” years later at a book event for Less Than Zero, “It wasn’t you, right?”
»New novel by American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis is much more unsettling«