Ellis, Bret Easton

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my thoughts on "american psycho."
A Narcissistic Tale
Greatest Book Ever Written
Perfection ...
The images in this book will disturb me forever

American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Rules of Attraction
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ASIN: 0679735771
Release Date: 1991-03-06

Book Description

Now a major motion picture from Lion's Gate Films starring Christian Bale ( Metroland), Chloe Sevigny ( The Last Days of Disco), Jared Leto ( My So Called Life), and Reese Witherspoon ( Cruel Intentions), and directed by Mary Harron ( I Shot Andy Warhol).

In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.

Customer Reviews:

my thoughts on "american psycho.".......2007-06-20

i did not like it. too much icky stuff.

A Narcissistic Tale.......2007-05-22

I ordered this book, excited to read it. I had heard many good things about this novel, and began reading as soon as I received it.

I was incredibly disappointed. This book was filled with narcissistic ramblings and obsessive details which matter little to the story itself. The gore, though extensive, ends up being boring. There is gratuitious sex, which is also boring in its detail and violence. Every time Patrick bateman feels dread, it is "nameless." The story did not progress, and in the end, there was no resolution. In fact, i felt the book fell apart at its end.

This book is not an American classic, nor was it worth reading. Once I finished it, I felt I had wasted my time.

Greatest Book Ever Written.......2007-05-14

OK, so it's not really the greatest book ever written. But its my favorite, so in my little self-centered world, it is the best book ever written. It does start out a bit slow, but stick with it, because "American Psycho" does speed up and become - well - the greatest book ever written.

Readers who enjoy Chuck Palahuniuk (sp?), Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S Thompson, A Clockwork Orange, pointless violence and other fun stuff will LOVE this book.

Perfection ..........2007-05-09

What would the experience be like, if one could crawl into the mind of a madman. Meet Perfect Patrick Bateman ... perfect hair, perfect body, perfect job, and perfect fiancée. What more could a shiny shoed Wall Street up-and-comer ask for in the over-indulgent 80's. For success in the 80's was all about perfection -- who had it and who didn't. Patrick Bateman is certainly not lacking in perfection. Even the gruesome, cruel, beyond rational thought acts of violence he commits are perfectly orchestrated down the very last detail, much like his attire.

But what is a young man to do when everyone around him can distinguish the infinite subtle details of a business card, yet they cannot remember his name. When is being trendy simply not trendy enough? What does a man have to do to get noticed ... kill people? Of course, set yourself apart, get your anger out, be creative -- nail guns, chainsaws, axes, and hangers ... puppies, kittens, and rats. Now that is what Patrick is talking about ... if your life has become a chocolate covered urinal cake, make your girlfriend eat it and then go play around in someone else's blood, but be sure to nail them to the floor first, you want their undivided attention, don't you?

I won't kid you, this satirical look at the world is well beyond disturbing ... but what can you expect from a psychopathic lunatic. Patrick takes us through a day in the life -- his life, as grotesque and evil as it is. Yet, one minute, you will be falling over yourself with laughter at the trendy bar banter, and his upscale 1980's musical commentary, and the next minute, you will be walking away, hoping only to attempt to vomit what you just read out of your head, swearing you won't pick it back up again. And yet, for some reason you can't seem to help yourself, you need to keep turning those pages as Patrick takes you deeper and deeper into his nightmarish world ... and lithium will not save you.

An extraordinary work of genius. Although I have no comprehension how Mr. Ellis slept at night with Bateman at his side. And for those who spent their twenty-somethings in the 1980's, you will understand without a doubt the profound social commentary, which might even be more disturbing than Bateman himself.

The images in this book will disturb me forever.......2007-05-01

This book was the most disturbing book I have ever read.
I'm pretty thick skinned but this one had me reading during the day, it was too disturbing to read before bed, just couldn't handle those images dancing around my head before going to sleep. Despite that, I read this book from start to finish.
I have heard this book described as a black comedy, if this is the case, it's blacker than any black I've ever encountered. Though I have to admit, that Patrick Bateman's (our main psycho) obsessiveness in his personal hygiene routine, business cards and favourite musical artists, was both amusing and tiresome, with pages and pages dedicated to describing these things.
In the end I was glad to give this book back to it's owner, and hope that the images it left me with will fade in time.

Average customer rating:

For a first novel, not bad
great deal
Go West, young Man. Or, "Westward, Ho"
Great Book
Disappear inside these pages...

Less Than Zero
Bret Easton Ellis
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Rules of Attraction
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ASIN: 0679781498
Release Date: 1998-06-30

Book Description

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait
of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a
world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or
hope.

Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of
limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago,
and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his
best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday
turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy
mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.

Customer Reviews:

For a first novel, not bad.......2007-06-17

Ellis' best novel is American Psycho. But in Less Than Zero one can see the direction Ellis was heading in: first-person monologue narration, disillusioned, vapid characters and scenes of disturbing violence. This novel is very good, especially when considered in the context of being a first novel. It's one I will re-read and continue to study. Some have compared this work to Catcher in the Rye, but it's more aptly linked to The Great Gatsby with its hyper-realism and trouble in paradise themes. However, in Less Than Zero Clay never finds out what he wants, never pursues it, and learns nothing. And in that regard, Ellis outdoes Fitzgerald. Ellis has the art of the tight sentence down, but Fitzgerald is more moving and beautiful. But Ellis' intention is to shock, which he does very well. Unless you've already read American Psycho, and then Less Than Zero might slightly underwhelm you.

great deal .......2007-06-12

I really enjoyed the book. Thank you for providing it to me

Go West, young Man. Or, "Westward, Ho".......2007-03-10

So 18-year old Clay comes home to Los Angeles from college in woodsy New Hampshire for Christmas Break and very rapidly resumes LA cruising altitude: partying, booze, getting a tan, partying, seeing all the hot bands making the rounds at clubs-of-the-moment like the Roxy or The Edge, more partying, checking out movies in Westwood blitzed out of his mind, cruising around LA, watching bootleg Mexican snuff porn (featuring underage victims & chainsaws and wire hangers),

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Bret Easton Ellis's "Less than Zero" is a fine little primer on how the Rich & Famous live and die in LA, with Clay as our Virgil in this descent into a 1980's Dante's Inferno peopled by the Lithium-addled (but thin, baby, thin! and tan! and loaded! filthy stinking rich, Maserati country baby!)Walking Dead. Tunes, by the way, courtesy of Duran Duran and Psychedelic Furrs.

He goes to lots of parties: celebrity parties, pre-movie deal parties at Spago with his movie producer Dad and his estranged mother, etc. He does a lot of good drugs. He does a lot of bad drugs. He drives around in his Mercedes. At times he practically shoves whole boxes of Kleenex up his brutalized, quivering snout to calk up the torrent of blood & snot, the collateral damage of his cocaine habit. He scopes out corpses in alleys.

"Less than Zero" proves you really can't go Home again, particularly if Home really wasn't much of a place to begin with. And you know, the thing is, with all the bling, the bank, the field trips to Spago & Chasen's, the road trips on the Pacific Coast Highway in the Porsche, holing up at the beachhouse at Monterey---with all that, if your life is so featureless there are no real markers or mileposts, it's pretty hard to get There from Here---or figure out how Here relates to anything at all.

As the billboard says: "Disappear Here."

Think of "Less than Zero"---the text, our guidebook into this Wonderland of banality, boredom, and high-octane depravity---as a kind of camera obscura, its image fused, heightened, now sharpened, now distorted, with light, speed, and time.

When Bret Easton Ellis released "Lunar Park", a kind of transgressive lament for his estranged father, critics howled that Ellis was playing dilettante, dipping his toes into the weedy moat of Horror reserved for Stephen King & Dean Koontz.

Really? Ellis hasn't ever written Horror? Even leaving "American Psycho" out of this, read "Less than Zero" and answer that question for yourself: Ellis's palmy, leafy, luxuriant LA is less American Dream than Nightmare, a twilight-realm of hardbodies and supercars where the daytime shadows flit across the flickering water-bottoms of swimming pools, and monsters move in the palm groves.

With that in mind, "Less than Zero" revelatory as a scalpel, is also as simple as an elementary school essay: bottom line, it's all about what Clay does on his Christmas vacation.

No, really.

So it's a little spyglass into the world of Clay & his old school buddies and their parties and sushi lunches and aimless high-end meanderings through the LA jungle. And the Kids are really, really, really *not* aliright.

For instance: Daniel sliced his hand up, has wires poking up through his raw phalanges, takes way too much lithium and is uncomfortably numb.

Julian is inaccessible, gomezing around his haunts in LA in a black porsche with tinted windows and stalked by wild-eyed panic; Blair, Clay's former girlfriend, who wants to know what love is---you know? alana & Kim, her friends, who evidently have an abortion competition going; muriel, who's anorexic and likes shoving shiny pointy things into her blood vessels, and Rip the drug dealer, who's *way* upbeat.

Clay gets driven around in the luxury cars his friends own, or rather, the cars their parents bought them: Ferraris, Porsches, BMWs. He goes to Fatburger; he checks out flicks half-bombed at Westwood, the Beverly Center, high in the Hollywood Hills, he worries about werewolves. about earthquakes. about a billboard that says, ominously & nonchalantly, "Disappear Here".

There are a few writers I'm actively, wrenchingly jealous of: Cormac McCarthy is one of them, Ellis is another. Ellis's peculiar talent is to infuse this bleak landscape with a kind of narcotic readability, while simultaneously excising his own voice, the presence of the author, entirely from the pages.

Fitting enough for this nasty little piece of grue & High Society, a world that excises its creatures as effectively as the High Sonorran Wind howling over the desert floor erases the hardtable playa.

JSG

Great Book.......2007-02-27

After reading "Great Gatsby" for the first time, I felt that the plot wasn't what made the book magic, but rather the telling of it. The attention to details and the tiny nuances that brought to life an era long since past. I've wanted to read "Less than Zero," for a long time and finally did. It was actually better than I thought it would be and is completely gripping. Now that two decades have passed, it also has a nice nostalgic feel when he talks about beta machines, mtv, and arcades. I would highly recommend this book.

Disappear inside these pages..........2007-02-09

Reading `Less than Zero' was like a revelation for me. It made me want to be a better writer. As the pages kept turning and this `anti-story' kept unfolding I became more and more determined to one day write this well. What Bret Easton Ellis proves so effortlessly here is that it's not the story you tell that matters most, its how you tell it, and Bret tells it so brilliantly that the reader is drawn in and absorbed by every word. I refer to this novella as an anti-story and what I mean by that is that it doesn't fancy itself with a hardnosed plot. In other words, it doesn't have a set destination, a problem that needs solving, a mystery to unveil or a life to renew. This is simply a story about teenagers and how they spend their vacation.

The novella's protagonist is Clay, a college student who comes back home during his mid-year break. The novella is split up in small vignettes that tell of Clay's interactions with his one-time girlfriend Blair, the spoiled party girl, and Julian his one-time dealer who owes him money. Clay hops from party to party and hops in and out of bed with whomever he happens to be partying with. He snorts cocaine with his friends and shares it (unwillingly) with his younger sisters.

Despite all these, what would you call them, personality flaws Clay in the end becomes a solid example of tortured youth and the epitome of self loathing. Clay lives his life the way he sees fit, mostly due to the poor example of everyone around him. He has no moral guidance, no one telling him right from wrong and so he falls into the same pitfalls over and over again. He tries to defend his actions to himself when he can as is seen the morning after a sexual encounter with a male acquaintance. Clay looks at himself in the mirror and tells himself "that wasn't so bad" as if to say "that wasn't the worst decision was it?"

There are other times though when he can't justify or condone what's going on around him and his confusion and sheer dissatisfaction with where his life and the lives of those around him are headed is as clear as day. After witnessing Julian's desperate attempt to pay back his debts (prostituting himself) Clay locks himself in the bathroom, unable to watch any further. After realizing that his friends are sick enough to create their own snuff film his thoughts, his reaction proves that this is a young man afraid of where he's headed, afraid of what he could become.

This novella begins and ends with no actual progress made. Nothing that happens throughout its pages makes any bit of difference to the actual outcome of its characters, but that's what makes this story so engrossing. These are just real people, real teenagers struggling to survive amidst a world cold and distant. They have problems that they accept and live with because to them they aren't problems but just a way of life. Their parents are self obsessed cretins and so they in turn become self obsessed cretins, but in Clay we see a glimmer of hope that this large mass of dysfunctional teens may in fact be learning something after all.

Average customer rating:

A different type of novel
Dark and disturbing yet no one seems to notice...
Working my way back to you, Babe, with a Happiness that Died
From darkness into ...more darkness
Tedious

The Rules of Attraction
Bret Easton Ellis
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Less Than Zero
American Psycho
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Lunar Park

ASIN: 067978148X
Release Date: 1998-06-30

Book Description

Set at a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England at the height of the Reagan 80s, The Rules of Attraction is a startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the future--or even the present--who become entangled in a curious romantic triangle. Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at self-consciously bohemian Camden College and treats their sexual posturings and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the center of their lives.

Lauren changes boyfriends every time she changes majors and still pines for Victor who split for Europe months ago and she might or might not be writing anonymous love letter to ambivalent, hard-drinking Sean, a hopeless romantic who only has eyes for Lauren, even if he ends up in bed with half the campus, and Paul, Lauren's ex, forthrightly bisexual and whose passion masks a shrewd pragmatism. They waste time getting wasted, race from Thirsty Thursday Happy Hours to Dressed To Get Screwed parties to drinks at The Edge of the World or The Graveyard. The Rules of Attraction is a poignant, hilarious take on the death of romance.

Customer Reviews:

A different type of novel.......2007-06-12

Many people dislike this book and deride its lack of cohesion and unsympathetic characters. However, like most of Ellis' work, The Rules of Attraction uses snippets of characters' lives to tell the story of a community, or at least of a group. This book does not have the obsessiveness of American Psycho, and it is somewhat subtler, but it again uses the shallow desires and thoughts of it's characters to paint a picture of a group of college kids at a small liberal arts school, and it allows the reader a glimpse into parts of the mind not usually devoted to in novels. If you are a fan of Ellis, you will like this book.

Dark and disturbing yet no one seems to notice..........2007-02-12

After reading the impressive `Less than Zero' I was compelled to move right along to `The Rules of Attraction' and I am so glad that I did. Already accustomed to Ellis' writing style I was immediately drawn into his sophomore novella, engrossed in every chapter, every character and every embellishment of college life complete with all its highs and lows. Following the same formula as he had with `Less than Zero', `The Rules of Attraction' really has no story to tell. It's just the random lives of a handful of college students as they wallow through their lives one day at a time.

The novella covers quite a few heavy subjects including drug addiction, suicide and abortion, but everything is discussed and explained in such blunt almost sarcastic dialog that it's not really `heavy'. It's obvious to the reader that the circumstances and consequences of actions are of less and less importance to the parties involved and it adds a layer of realism to each character. I say realism, and that may sound odd, but it's really not. All too often novels and films over-dramatize subjects and to me that takes away from the gritty realism of the circumstances. Bret here capitalizes on the pure simplicity of the average teen's mind and it works wonders.

The novella discusses quite a few students, but three in particular are explored deeper than others. Sean Bateman is in love with Lauren Hynde who is still waiting for Victor to return from Europe. Paul Denton is becoming more and more obsessed with Sean while he's still mourning the loss of his ex-boyfriend Mitchell to the arms of a WOMAN named Candace who just so happens to have a thing for Sean. You may think it sounds like your average teen pining for love and affection but you're wrong. It's much more than that.

Littered with sarcasm and wit yet layered with eventual sadness and desperation, `The Rules of Attraction' manages to flush out humanity in every sentence. From the uncomfortable car ride home after an abortion to the dramatic and heartbreaking suicide, as mentioned, there is quite a bit of `heavy' material contained in this small book, but reader be warned that the characters involved will not feel as deeply disturbed by the outcomes as you will. Any fan of the film will feel even more fulfilled after reading Ellis' brilliant novella and will find it amusing how Victor's European escapade has been literally translated word for word into the film.

Working my way back to you, Babe, with a Happiness that Died.......2007-02-01

Question: It's the big night, the Dress to get Screwed Party---what should you wear? Answer: Nothing, you clown!

Oh God---don't be that way. Get away from that Keg---it's running on empty, anyway---and come sit over here. Out of the way. All of Carlton Hall is filled with these drug-addled idiots, stoners, sycophants, axe-murders & junkies, Drama-Queens, depraved creatures of the night, satyrs & nymphs and the Great God Pan and my *God*, for all we know a bunch of Dartmouth people---and we might as well talk, me & thee, while New Order is droning out merciless monotone black-hearted menace crunching pounding throbbing out of the speakers.

Let's talk about the Rules of Attraction.

They are---well, it's just not as simple as Boy Meets Girl, Boys gets Girl---not anymore, man. No way.It's more like: Boy meets Girl, who likes Boy, who likes other Girl, who's involved in a crazy sex-thing with Boy (from LA) who might have something strange going on with Boy (at Harvard?), who (rumor has it) got Girl into a little trouble. It's Camden College, mid-eighties.

Reagan posters in the dormhouse, but mutilated, defaced, covered with little ironic black Satan mustachios. Picture postcard perfect New Hampshire liberal arts school, rich with wealthy patrons and a supple endownment, good as Hell to look at in the Fall, preferably Fall with all those pretty colors, lots of Ivy on the curtain wall and gables and---Who are we kidding? Camden College is a prison, a prison for the children of the terminally Rich.

Or maybe not a prison: Bret Easton Ellis conjures up a kind of way-station, a Purgatorio, in "Rules of Attraction", a switching point, the midpoint between Alpha & Omega, between Genesis & Terminus, but you can't get either place from here, and there is NOTHING---I mean, NOTHING---in between.

That's what Ellis's vicious, biting, incalculably funny little book is about, and I'll be damned if it's pretty consumptive reading, following all this Nothing. Into the den of despair, then: Sean Bateman (a mere monster in teething, compared to his investment banker brother Patrick) swoons over Lauren, who is snarky and broods and pines over Victor, traipsing over Europe and desperate to find Jaime, who is mysterious, reclusive, and at least two steps ahead of him; Paul Denton, Drama-Queen, driven to distraction over Sean, mourning Mitchell, who is tramping about campus (& the City ) with that plummy little Freshman Candice---who Sean likes---and the Frenchman Bertrand, who longs for Lauren & virtually anyone else, who is Sean's insufferable roomate.

The Rules of Attraction, then: whoever you love, probably doesn't love you. Or is pining for your Mortal Enemy. Or is using you, for some reason known only to them, or to the Great God Pan, or to Destiny. Or has nothing but pure acid-battery drunken-morning-puke contempt for you.

"Rules of Attraction" is a wicked little gem of literary curare, all high-style and aimless debauchery, and the best of it is that Ellis springs some kind of wicked little trapdoor into the minds of his victims. It's a strange tale, strangely told, in a kind of "Rashomon" fashion, & so spiked with bias & jaundice & strangeness & this wild breed of melancholy that it is utterly impossible to fathom who is telling the truth, or even if there is any truth to be Told.

There is also this aching sadness, and this maddening eeriness, about the book, the kind of atmosphere, like the famous yellow-fog London Peculiar, that hangs about Bret Easton Ellis's work, that single-minded eeriness, that palpable sense of dread and doom and mounting unease, that whisper of foul murders committed by Devils & Demons summoned up by our own vanity and boredom and indifference, that makes this piece an especially spooky read---particularly when Part-Time Lovers Lauren & Sean try to Play House. Icky.

A bazillion years ago---well, it was probably 1987---I was in this little New Wave Noveau Cuisine pizza house, where the pizza slices could be measured in nano-meters (and the food was snipped and parsed and dressed and elegant and inedible), where you hung out to hang out, to hobnob, to sneer, not because the food was good (Jesus, quite the contrary)---all high-style and in-your-face effrontery---and the menu had some little blurb like "Everything Reduces to Nothing". I think the Camden Damned would agree, and perhaps understand---Rock n' Roll, Deal with it.

Read the stilted, halting, loveless scene between the increasingly distracted Paul Denton and his mother, and try not to feel this grinding, horrific sadness, this despair born of potential denied, of things vital left unsaid. Remembered lines, between the sheets

I think the Party's over.

JSG

From darkness into ...more darkness.......2007-01-18

A dark, claustrophobic comedy. The reader's amusement can only be tinged with sadness at the waste of these lives with no meaning or purpose. The novel begins and ends in mid-sentence, emphasising that there is no closure here, only a sense of drift. This device also puts the reader in a position of overhearing what is going on, though still feeling a sense of involvement with the desperate lives before us. A useful preparation,too, for the same author's later novel American Psycho, which is even more savage as a satire and more shocking in its subject matter. As a 'Brit' I learned a lot from both books about the shadow side of gilded American youth and the price paid for the American dream. Recommended.

Tedious .......2006-11-16

Boring characters, random couplings, and predictable situations are hallmarks of this repetitive book.

Average customer rating:

Whether it's really "true" or not, it's atleast truly great...
truly original voice
It may be based on pure bias, but I'll stand by this novel despite its many shortcomings...
A World Like No Other
Escaping Character and Entering Lunar Park

Lunar Park
Bret Easton Ellis
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries)
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The Good Life

ASIN: 0375727272
Release Date: 2006-08-29

Amazon.com

<p clear=left> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /> <div class="bucket"> <b class="h1">Book Description:
Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs.

Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety--only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father's, his stepdaughter's doll violently "malfunctions," and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events--a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son's age--Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania.

Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution--about love and loss, fathers and sons--in what is surely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career. <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> <b class="h1"> A Tale of Two Brets: An Amazon.com Interview with Bret Easton Ellis
<img src="http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/authors/easton-ellis_brett.m.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> In his novel Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis takes first-person narrative to an extreme, inserting himself (and a host of real characters from the publishing world) into the haunting story of a drugged-out famous writer living in the suburbs trying to reconnect with his wife and son and reconcile his damaged past. Ellis is at the top of his game in Lunar Park, his first novel since 1999's Glamorama, delivering a disturbing and delirious novel about celebrity, writers, and fathers and sons (not to mention a cameo from notorious Ellis creation, Patrick Bateman). Amazon.com senior editor Brad Thomas Parsons spoke with Ellis in a Seattle to Los Angeles phone call to talk about the fact and fiction behind Lunar Park, New York versus LA, '80s music, and the whole "American Psycho thing."
<br clear=all> Read the Amazon.com interview with Bret Easton Ellis <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> <b class="h1"><em>Less Than Zero</em> (1985) <img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679781498.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left">
Published when Ellis was a junior at Bennington, Less Than Zero is the mesmerizing first-person chronicle of Clay, our laconic, zoned-out guide to a subculture of over-privileged nihilism in early '80s Los Angeles. He travels back home from Camden College (a thinly veiled Bennington) for Christmas break and re-enters his circle of jaded friends--including his ex-girlfriend Blair, and his best friend Julian, who's now hustling to support his drug habit--and a parade of Porches, late-night parties, cocaine, and casual destruction.

Ellis on Ellis: "I don't think it's a perfect book by any means, but it's valid. I get where it comes from. I get what it is. There's a lot of it that I wish was slightly more elegantly written. Overall, I was pretty shocked. It was pretty good writing for someone who was 19." <br clear=all> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> <b class="h1"><em>The Rules of Attraction</em> (1987)
<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/067978148X.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> A line-up of Camden College students share the narrating duties in The Rules of Attraction, Ellis' sex-fueled, drug-baked second novel. There's Lauren (who's in the midst of losing her virginity as the book opens), who longs for her boyfriend Victor, currently traveling through Europe; Lauren's ex, Paul, a bisexual party boy who hooks up with hard-drinking closet-case Sean (surname Bateman--that's right, younger brother of Patrick), who also has the hots for Lauren. Less than Zero's Clay makes a cameo appearance as well as a passing glimpse of Ellis' Bennington classmate Donna Tartt's murderous Classics majors from The Secret History.

Ellis on Ellis: "It might be my favorite book of mine. I was writing that book while I was at college. Sort of like the best of times, the worst of times. There was a lot of elation, there was a lot of despair. It was just a really fun book to write. I loved mimicking all the different voices. The stream of conscious does get a little out of hand. I kind of like that about the book. It's kind of all over the place. It's casual. It's scruffy. That's the one book of mine that I have a very, very soft spot for." <br clear=all> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> <b class="h1"><em>American Psycho</em> (1991)
<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679735771.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> Shopaholic sociopath Patrick Bateman's killer grip drags readers into a bloody, brand-name, urban nightmare as the 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie executes his grooming habits and eviscerates strangers with equal élan. Simon & Schuster dropped the too-hot-to-handle American Psycho which was then published as a paperback original by Vintage Books. Ellis received death threats while the book was boycotted, sliced up by reviewers, and went on to become a bestseller. Mary Harron's 2000 film version starred then little-known British actor Christian Bale, who would later suit up as the Dark Knight in 2005's Batman Begins.

Ellis on Ellis: "It was good. It was fun. It was not nearly as pretentious as I remember I wanted it to be when I was writing it. I found it really fast-moving. I found it really funny. And I liked it a lot. The violence was... it made my toes curl. I really freaked out. I couldn't believe how violent it was. It was truly upsetting. I had to steel myself to re-read those passages." <br clear=all> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> <b class="h1"><em>The Informers</em> (1994)
<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679743243.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> Ellis returns to early '80s Los Angeles ennui with The Informers, a loosely connected collection of stories of the bored, rich, and morally depraved, written around the same time as Less than Zero. Sex, drugs, and gratuitous violence take center stage, with characters including an aging, predatory anchorwoman, a debauched rock star tearing through Japan, and a pick-up artist vampire. While some of the vignettes echo better Ellis works, ultimately the stories don't add to much as a whole. Book critics are less than receptive to Ellis' post-American Psycho offering.

Ellis on Ellis: "Those were written while I was at Bennington. I wrote a lot of short stories between 1981 or 1982 or so... The Informers more or less kind of represented probably the best of those stories. I wrote a lot of really bad ones, but those are the ones that worked the best together." <br clear=all> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> <b class="h1"><em>Glamorama</em> (1999)
<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0375703845.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> Actor-model Victor Ward (who first made an appearance in the Ellis oeuvre in The Rules of Attraction) is the narrator of Glamorama, Ellis longest novel yet. Ellis offers bold-faced names and celebrity skewering in the first half of the book as Victor tries to open a Manhattan club while cheating on his supermodel girlfriend and double-crossing his partner, but the second half takes a violent, paranoid turn as Victor is sent to England and unwittingly lured into a sadistic ring of international terrorists (posing as supermodels) leaving a bloody trail across the globe.

Ellis on Ellis: "[T]he book wasn't necessarily about terrorism to me. It was about a whole bunch of other stuff. It's definitely the book that I can tell--I don't know if other people can tell but I can tell as a writer--is probably the most divisive that I've written. It has an equal number of detractors as it does fans. It doesn't really hold true with the other books. It was the one that took the longest to write, and the one that seemed the most important at the time. It's an unwieldy book... I like it." <br clear=all> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> <b class="h1">Ellis on DVD <table width=100% cellpadding=4> <tr align=center> <td width="33%">

<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00005V9IH.01.TZZZZZZZ.jpg" border=0>
Less Than Zero </p> </td> <td width="33%"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0009A40ES.01.TZZZZZZZ.jpg" border=0>
American Psycho </td> <td width="33%"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00007L4KI.01.TZZZZZZZ.jpg" border=0><BR> The Rules of Attraction </td> </tr> </table> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> <b class="h1">Will the Real Bret Easton Ellis Please Stand Up?
Visit the author's Web site at www.2brets.com. <br clear=all>

Book Description

Bret Ellis, the narrator of Lunar Park, is a writer whose first novel Less Than Zero catapulted him to international stardom while he was still in college. In the years that followed he found himself adrift in a world of wealth, drugs, and fame, as well as dealing with the unexpected death of his abusive father. After a decade of decadence a chance for salvation arrives; the chance to reconnect with an actress he was once involved with, and their son. But almost immediately his new life is threatened by a freak sequence of events and a bizarre series of murders that all seem to connect to Ellis’s past. His attempts to save his new world from his own demons makes Lunar Park Ellis’s most suspenseful novel.

In this chilling tale reality, memoir, and fantasy combine to create not only a fascinating version of this most controversial writer but also a deeply moving novel about love and loss, parents and children, and ultimately forgiveness.

Customer Reviews:

Whether it's really "true" or not, it's atleast truly great..........2007-06-16

Unfortunately, it's not very often that I find a book with a plot line so engrossing that I'm itching to get home from work just to read it, or tempted to hide it behind my text book in class. The last experience I had like that was with Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters, back in 2003.

Anyways Lunar Park is supposedly a true story of the "posession" and hauntings that the author, Bret Easton Ellis, experienced after writing, and producing into a movie, the book American Psycho. The book is intro'd by a quick story of Ellis' overnight fame & success, up until the point of his long-term relationship with a famous actress. They break up for a time, then she takes him back in to help him get out of the rut he's been in, with drugs and whatnot. She has 2 children of her own, one of which is Ellis' son, and the emotional deficits & awkward tension between the family members is overwhelming, almost nauseating. Ellis can't help but be reminded of his own broken relationship with his father, never reconciled before his death.

The rest of the book roll out slowly and steadily, with never a dull moment once the hauntings begin. The paint starts chipping off their brand new house, to reveal a pink stucco like the house of his childhood. He catches glimpses of a character (who looks alot like Patrick Bateman in the American Psycho movie) driving around in the old car his father used to drive. His step daughter's doll "comes to life" at night, proven by claw marks in the walls and eventually, on the children. Also tied into the plot is the dissappearance of local boys, all around Ellis' son's age.

And that's barely scratching the surface. What makes it most honest is the way in which Ellis reacts to everything, in a very normal way, the way you or I would react.

It's terrifying, gripping, sharp-witted, emotional, frustrating, twisted... the list goes on, it's everything I need in a good novel to keep me up past my bedtime (although I'll admit, sometimes I kept reading because I was just too afraid to put the lights out!).

truly original voice.......2007-06-06

I'm a pretty big BEE fan, and I love his cool, detached writing style, and how all his books are slightly deranged. I love how the protagonists are always a bit off - a big part of you detests them, a little bit of you feels sorry for them, and a tiny piece of you is jealous of the seemingly glamorous lives they live (the sex, drugs, parties, dining at Spago with supermodels stuff...not the ax murder Patrick Bateman stuff).

Lunar Park is a bit different, because while I felt the expected pity and disgust toward the main character in the beginning of the novel, toward the end he made a turn for the better and I found myself somewhat invested in him. The story follows an accomplished and somewhat unhinged author (named, err, Bret Easton Ellis), as he tries to settle into a "normal life" of marriage and fatherhood. The book is semi-autographical, in that the background of the main character is based on the author's real life (several references to and quotes from BEE's past novels are cited); but the story itself is mostly fictional.

The satire and social commentary BEE is known for is definitely not missing from the book. Whereas his past books commented on the casual drug abuse in the 80s and 90s by social upscale slackers, I found it interesting that the most shocking form of drug use (abuse?) in Lunar Park is by children, by prescription. But this is just a side note to the main story of Lunar Park, which is basically a ghost story. And it's really quite scary - complete with ghosts, stalkers, poltergeists, a demonic Furby-like doll coming to life, and an appearance of Patrick Bateman.

Overall, there were parts that didn't seem to fit together quite right, and the ending left me slightly confused about certain things, but the story kept me riveted. It was almost refreshing to read BEE's writing after having a break from him for so long (I hadn't read one of his books since college), and I think he has a truly original voice.

It may be based on pure bias, but I'll stand by this novel despite its many shortcomings..........2007-05-14

`Lunar Park' opens and closes more than splendidly. It actually may contain Bret Easton Ellis' greatest work yet. It's elegant, graceful, blunt and satirical while remaining completely original just like his work preceding. In fact, Ellis makes his life seem so unbelievable that while he opens and closes with pretty much a fact based fictional retelling of his life, past and present, your drawn to his character as if he were the most debased and unthinkable creation Ellis has ever penned. In short, he makes the auto-biography/biography enjoyable. The sad part is that when Ellis breaks away from his biography and begins telling his Steven King inspired horror story he loses touch with what made his open and close so brilliant. He starts to wane.

This isn't to say for one moment that `Lunar Park' is not in it of itself a fine literary journey. Ellis is still a masterful storyteller, it's just that the horror that Ellis so beautifully orchestrates is most effective when tearing at the fabrics of what makes us human, not when he's seeing ghosts and demons. In fact, the hardest part about reading `Lunar Park' is realizing that it'll never frighten you. Ellis tries maybe too hard to get a scare in here or there but he fails to instigate even a chill. Instead he builds a wall of frustration around the reader until he's dulled to Ellis' tempting and teasing and gives up even hoping for a blood-curdling scene or a heart-racing realization.

Come to think of it, Ellis does a lot of tempting and teasing in this novel, when it comes to pretty much everything. As far as an Ellis novel goes this is by far the tamest. There's almost no sex and the violence is far from explicit. In fact it almost feels as if you're reading another author all together. The only real shedding of light as far as the basis of anything Ellis comes in his relationship with his children. In Ellis novels past he has always built a wall around family interaction, giving us the battered and torn version of the family circle, but what's interesting here is that Ellis decides to delve a little deeper and give us a man trying in his own strange way to revert that and make a difference. This is Ellis breaking his own mold, and it is the first clue amongst may that this is going to be a ride least expected.

So here, Ellis paints for us his life in another realm so-to-speak. This is the life Ellis could have had and he tells it as if it is the life he is now living. What's interesting is that he claims everything in this novel really happened, and in a way I believe that to be true. This is a novel about a man coming to terms with inner demons. So did Ellis really find himself chased by a strange ghastly demon? No, but in his mind he's run from many I'm sure. So here, in this life, Ellis is married to an actress and finds himself father to two children, one biological, one not. Living a normal life is a far cry from what he's used to and it's slowly driving him mad. But during a Halloween party he's tossed out of the normal and into the paranormal and his life starts to spiral, beginning with that night and moving forward day after day, night after night.

From the return of his dead father to the emersion of Patrick Bateman in the flesh, Ellis is tortured by a slew of horrific daily occurrences, and as his house takes on an evil demeanor of its own Ellis is forced to reevaluate his life decisions, his own human mechanics and its here that Ellis takes true form. That is why I say in my title that I'll stand by this novel despite its many shortcomings, because, while Ellis may not illicit shivers with his demonic toys he does evoke fear in the pit of my stomach as he falls apart on paper, dissecting his own spirit as he battles the demons within, and that my friends is Ellis as his finest and most horrifying.

A World Like No Other.......2007-04-24

The first chapter of this novel is among the funniest things Ellis has ever written. True, it may seem a bit insensitive to laugh at the descriptions of debauchery and drug addiction, but this is pure Ellis, and this time it's his "own" story he's telling, from his youth to celebrity adulthood. With the "biomythography" (to borrow a phrase from Audre Lorde) intact, Ellis brings us into his present: he's newly married to a movie star, lives with a son (conceived years earlier) and stepdaughter out in the posh suburbs where he's trying (and failing) to build a new life, teach a writing course, hosting parties that Jay McInerney attends and working on a new edgy novel with a sure to be controversial title.

A quick word about Ellis's descriptions of his fanciful novel his character is writing, entitled "Teenage P____." (I'm not going to type it out here.) I was reading this section of "Lunar Park" on the subway ride home and started laughing. Out loud. I couldn't help myself, it was that funny and over the top, so I forced myself to close the book for a few minutes because even though I was reading, a man sitting and laughing hard by himself on the train still looks odd.

The opening chapters of "Lunar Park" are so sharp, taking place as it does in an alternative America where the terrorist attacks have never ended and all kids are doped up before being sent to school, that it draws blood. Even when the story starts to veer into the preternatural, it's so well-written that I didn't have any problem "suspending my disbelief." (Interestingly, I read a comment that this is Ellis's first novel not written in the present tense.)

Midway, the novel starts to suffer from a little bit of overload, full of stop and go moments, references to "Hamlet" coming at us from all sides, Stephen King-style parenthetical breaks and horror story moments. In "The Haunting of Hill House", Theo and Nell are outside and Theo starts screaming at Nell to run and not look back; Ellis shows us what we'd have seen if she'd looked back, as it comes lurching up the backyard to him. There is also a possessed toy and a boy named Robby, like in "Poltergeist," although that may just be a happy coincidence. The novel's conclusion left me with more questions than I like, but this book is a great step in Ellis's growth as one of our best chroniclers of contemporary life.

Escaping Character and Entering Lunar Park.......2007-04-10

Being terribly overrun by a stuffed animal, affectionately called Terby, night after night upon making a decision to leave your "old ways" and tread in the waters of rekindling love, which means two kids, one a son and another a stepdaughter, can in no way do justice to the drug-addled writings we as an audience have viewed Bret Easton Ellis in the past. He's the Eighty's Brando of writing, the young punk with nothing to lose, but instead of a leather jacket and smug swagger he began being published straight from college with a calm explicit voice. With this fresh voice, capable of defining the vague hue of an emerging and relatively young in-ecstatic generation; "the MTV generation", he has written books such as Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho - all of which have been made into large budget feature films over the past two decades.
In his most recent book, Lunar Park, Ellis has taken a compelling move to describe better to any reader familiar with his works how deep a writer's rabbit hole can go. In this faux- memoir Ellis recounts his past, complete in the style of efficient nihilism that made him the voice of a generation, as he slowly decides to live beyond his fame's proclivity to ambiguity and self-indulgence when he re-unites with an ex, Jayne Dennis, in an attempt to help raise their son, who's life Bret, until now, has been devoid. As Ellis' makes steps to become a part of an already existing family, his life, dreams, sleep, and all together reality are broken down when his past begins to reconstitute itself within a series a bizarre yet eerily familiar murders.
In this brilliant jaunt aimed at contemporary writing itself, Lunar Park can act as indirect directions for the process of writing, itself, at certain points of the book. Any aspiring writer realizes the importance of the initial line of any poem, short story, or prose so, Ellis takes this opportunity to re-familiarize the reader with the somewhat yet probable past stardom of his life until now in the first chapter. The first chapter acts as the first line. You need to know the author of this book in order to know the main character in this book. The main character is the author, and the author is the setting of the reality of this novel. Ellis manages to fully immerse the reader into his world this way, both in the reality and the hallucinatory properties of the story.
During the mental cataclysms experienced by the author a new identity is fully realized by Ellis' own decision making as a writer. Emanating from this alter ego, "the writer", the main character is given guidance, direction, shown visions, and tidbits of information to help him solve the mysteries of his life in order to protect his family's. There is a dualistic reality that is based in the only vantage point supplied to the reader, Ellis, which is ultimately initially based off the reality of Ellis' life. Even then the physical and metaphysical aspects of human emotion and confrontation of demons within self-history blur creating one of the most mesmerizing books of Ellis to date.

Average customer rating:

Glamorama
Ellis' Best Work
Double the confusion of American Psycho, half the quality
So is this where Zoolander got it's inspiration?!
good, disturbing, but good.

Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries)
Bret Easton Ellis
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

Less Than Zero
The Rules of Attraction
The Informers
Lunar Park
American Psycho

ASIN: 0375703845
Release Date: 2000-03-21

Amazon.com

Glamorama is a satirical mass-murder opus more ambitious than Bret Easton Ellis's 1990 American Psycho. It starts as a spritz-of-consciousness romp about kid-club entrepreneur Victor Ward, "the It boy of the moment," an actor-model up for Flatliners II. Ellis has perfect pitch for glam-speak, and he gives nightlife the fizz, pace, and shimmer it lacks in drab reality. Anyone could cite the right celeb names and tunes, but like a rock-polishing machine, his prose gives literary sheen to fame-chasing air-kissers. He's coldly funny: when Victor's girl tries to argue him out of a breakup, she angrily snorts six bumps of coke, stops, mutters, "Wrong vial," snorts four corrective doses from whatever she has in her other fist, then objects to a rival at the party wearing the same dress she's wearing.

You had to be there; Ellis makes you feel you are. But such satire is a very smart bomb targeting a very large barn. Models' status anxiety doesn't merit Ellis's Tom Wolfe-esque expertise. Glamorama gets better when Victor gets drafted into a mysterious group of model-terrorists who bomb 747s and the Ritz in Paris, wearing Kevlar-lined Armani suits. Oh, they still behave like shallow snobs, pronouncing "cool" as if it had 12 o's. But now when somebody swills Cristal, it's apt to be poisoned, to horrific effect, which Ellis expertly, affectlessly describes. His enfant-terrible debut, Less Than Zero, aped Joan Didion. Now Ellis has grown into a lesser Don DeLillo--and that's high praise. --Tim Appelo

Book Description

"Arguably the novel of the 1990s... Glamorama should establish Ellis as the most fearless and ambitious writer of his generation...A must read." --The Seattle Times

The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero continues to shock and haunt us with his incisive and brilliant dissection of the modern world. In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed culture and increases the volume exponentially.

Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs who exists in magazines and gossip columns and whose life resembles an ultra-hip movie, is living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. And then it's time to move on to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind.

Customer Reviews:

Glamorama.......2007-05-30

This book is terrifying and exhilarating. I find Ellis' wording to be peotic. He is very good at describing every moment of the models life. If you enjoyed American Psycho, you will love this book.

Ellis' Best Work.......2006-11-29

I will admit that it took a couple tries at this book to really get into it--however, it takes some effort to get the maximum impact. I am surprised by how many self-described Ellis fans do not like this book. In my opinion, Ellis ended up taking many of the familiar themes of his previous works - the moral vacuity of high society, the darkness hidden behind glossy veneers (while adding very welcome attacks on fame, celebrity, the media, Hollywood, etc.) and simply taking them to an almost epic scale (in terms of both the size of the novel and his experimental methods in dealing with them.)

I believe Ellis is a highly calculating, methodical writer. Every word here is carefully chosen - so those long, rambling, banal-sounding passages are not by accident or haste.

The true magic of this novel comes in the second half, when the narrative fractures off into a complete and total expressionistic nightmare. The "normal" satire in the first half is both validated and eviscerated by the astonishing second half. Ellis gives up on all the rules, and pushes his thematic and moralist elements to their logical extremes. The entire "plot" of the novel (the models and the terrorism and whatnot) is really rather unimportant, and it's more about the emotions and insanity that remain once the thin threads of decency in Ellis' take on modern society completely break.

Double the confusion of American Psycho, half the quality.......2006-11-17

I just finished this 481 page monster of a book and I'm feeling a bit shell-shocked. Ellis plays with the idea that he worked on in American Psycho, where the reader and even the character may not know what reality is. I think he was more successful in American Psycho.

Victor Ward (a.k.a. Victor Johnson, who makes a brief appearance in Rules of Attraction) is a clueless model who spends the first half of the book wandering around aimlessly and never really paying attention to anything. He spends the second half in a world of confusion involving international terrorism and more. But is any of it real? Or is it all real? He's constantly checking his "script" to see what his lines are. This could be viewed as a commentary on the idea that nothing is real in the world of celebrities (and semi-celebrities). I don't really know what it is.

Interesting note: several characters from other books appear. Lauren Hynde, Sean Bateman, Bertrand Ripleis, and Jamie Fields from Rules of Attraction show up and Allison Poole from Jay McInerney's Story of My Life is a pretty prominent character. Even Patrick Bateman makes a brief appearance.

This book gets a little long and boring sometimes, but the exciting times make up for that. There's more descriptive gore than in American Psycho and more explicit sex scenes as well. They're borderline unbearable. I feel like Ellis got a little out of control with this one, but on the other hand, I feel like it's just such a big concept it's hard to wrap any understanding around it, and maybe that's the point. If you're interested in Ellis, check this one out, but only after you've read all his other stuff, because this is not his crowning achievement.

So is this where Zoolander got it's inspiration?!.......2006-11-03

This is the first book I have read by Ellis, and I wish I had read this before I saw Zoolander. That stupid movie kept lingering at the back of my mind as I read this. In a nutshell, the book is a convoluted, twisted version of the flick, add or subtract a fact or two. The book was redundant about halfway through (the tone Ellis wants to convey to the reader about Victor and the vapidity and absurdity of his "glamorous" lifestyle got a bit long in the tooth) but after that, I couldn't put the book down. I was enthralled by the storyline, and I was repulsed, yet drawn to the gratuity of his prose. It was an interesting read, to say the least.

good, disturbing, but good. .......2006-10-19

I am not going to go over the plot of this book, it's already been done. You can read WHY you should like or dislike a book, or you can read the book yourself and figure it out for yourself.
I can tell you this, the book is not as disturbing as "American Psyco", it is a harder read(the plot turn in the middle is hard to wrap your brain around for a while) and the sex and torture is graphic and at times-boring (been there with him in other novels). But Victor is a character worth reading about-worth getting to know. The writing at times is fantastic. Ellis can turn a phrase with the best of them.
I know that I could not read this without frequent stops to clear my head-but keep picking it up-it's great entertainment.

Average customer rating:

Never a dull moment...
Outstanding, yet least read book by BEE
Managed to keep me interested throughout
Novel or collection of short stories? Either way it's good.
Pretty damned good

The Informers
Bret Easton Ellis
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries)
The Rules of Attraction
Less Than Zero
Lunar Park
American Psycho

ASIN: 0679743243
Release Date: 1995-08-01

Book Description

This powerful and poignant novel of L.A., from the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, depicts a generation's overwhelming dissatisfaction with the way things are, and its insistence on remaining as detached and isolated as possible.

Customer Reviews:

Never a dull moment..........2007-04-17

Bret Easton Ellis has always been a personal favorite of mine, ever since the days of reading `Less than Zero' and `Rules of Attraction' and realizing that this guy is a literary genius. Reading `The Informers' though gives me an even more solid belief in the power within this mans pen-strokes, for with a collection this strong penned so young (he wrote all of these short stories while still in college before publishing his debut at the age of 20) there is no doubt in my mind that Ellis is a living legend. Delving into strong subject matter pertaining to his usual drugs, sex and violence but adding layers of human emotion, family deterioration reminiscent of Andre Dubus and even adding some of the supernatural to his style Ellis turns over a new leaf here and gives his readers something fresh.

The stories in general deal with some sickly twisted subject matter, from vampires and aliens to coked out abusive rock stars, but Bret always manages to keep each story a relatable experience not only to the reader but to each and every story. As some have mentioned, it can read like a novel told by many different perspectives and that's probably the best way to look at it overall.

My personal favorite passages have to do with the forced human interaction, like a teen struggling to refill his prescription or a few kinds aimlessly discussing death at a diner. Each word, each sequence of events adds an air to the story, to the overall experience and makes the chapter or story that much more real and influential. Bret is still able to capture his demeanor of meaninglessness, as in everything is null and void of consequence and utterly pointless, without losing his ability to raise genuine concern with his readers. That's the one trait I've always appreciated about Ellis' work. He can paint a picture bursting with characters so flawed and so empty and yet the reader is always drawn in so deep.

While this is not his finest set of work, nor is it his most well liked or campaigned it's a nice reminder of where this fine writer came from and it's a true testament to what real talent can produce. When you sit back and realize that this was some of the first writings Ellis ever penned you begin to understand his genius. Sure, he may not be everyone's cup of tea but any fan of Ellis and his body of work will do themselves a huge favor in reading this collection.

Outstanding, yet least read book by BEE.......2006-12-18

Each chapter, or should I say story, of this book is very well written. Each character has a different voice, and all stories are interested. I have trouble trying to understand why this book is not more popular amongst readers and BEE fans alike.

Managed to keep me interested throughout.......2006-10-24

I LOVE Ellis, but at the same time a lot of his books have some sereous flaws. Glamorama and American Psycho have a lot of great moments and scenes but also always bore the hell out of me at some points, becouse these books actually repeat the same unnecessary routine again and again.

But "The Informers" is the book I find perfect for Ellis. You see, it is quite short, the characters and themes change frequently and the chapters are very brief.

This is how it feels for me. You start to read the chapter, you dive into the story, it goes for some time and at the moment it might become boring and repetative it ENDS (unlike American Psycho, for example)! Then begins another chapter, presenting different character, different take on life in this universe anâ so on.

Every story hav some kind of plot and climax (unlike Am Psycho). It may seem inexistent, but really these stories are much like Chekov's short stories whwere there's no great dreamatic climax, but something is still there.

Also "The Informers" have an interesting structure as a whole. It starts with simple sketches of life situations, but as the book goes the stories start to get darker. There is more and more mentions of vampires and near the end you get some more heavy stories about a dying girl, a child-killer and a vampire, who narrates one of the stories.

So the book and its themes really evolve throughout.

The violence here, in my opinion, is also done much better, then in American Psycho or Glamorama. It's not so repetative and unnecessay, it takes very little place and supports the substance instead of just being a threat by itself.

Some stories are beter, some are worse. For me the highlight is "The Letters From LA", you just must read it. Also "In A Moment Of Silence" and a story about dad anâ son on islands are just brilliant (there are some others and actually every story is good in its own way).

And the thing I really love about Ellis is that he always manages to touch something within me, his books, although seemingly groutesqe at times, always feels very "real" and makes me think about my own experiences and people I know. That strange sence of realism in sometimes unrealistic stories is what I always really love about Ellis' writing (maybe it can be just called honesty).

All in all, "The Informers" has all the things, that make Ellis' books great but at the same time lacks some of the major flaws of his other books.

I highly recommend it.

Novel or collection of short stories? Either way it's good........2006-10-09

This collection of short stories is depressing and does little to hide that. Consisting of a cast of increasingly vacuous characters whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways, each story is as empty as the last. There's a girl writing letters to Sean Bateman (I'm assuming while he's at Camden living the events of Rules of Attraction), a washed-up rockstar in Japan, a bevy of blonde, spaced-out beach bums decked out in Wayfarers, and (completely out of place... maybe) a vampire. These stories take the emptiness that Ellis's characters in his first three novels felt to a new level. None of these characters really feel anything, unless it's a sense of self pity. They're like empty shells bumping into each other. And it seems that they are drawn to other "people" who are even less present than they are. For this reason, the vampire story *almost* fits in. It's just the next level past being, as one character tells another when he asks her what she means when she says that he's not "alive"; "just not dead".

Ellis's only flaw is that he makes writing seem too easy. Reading his stories and novels you would think he just sat down and jotted some stuff down. But his stories are too finely crafted for that. And the deceptive lack of effort is what makes his writing all the more entertaining. This book could be viewed as a collection of short stories, or as a novel written from several characters points of view, depending on how you read it. I choose the latter, as it's not that different from Rules of Attraction when read that way. Overall, a great book... if you're in to reading about depressing stories of the rich.

Pretty damned good.......2006-02-21

This book isn't like american psycho, much closer to less than zero. takes a look at los angeles life, and the overwhelming shallowness of it. The vampires are a bit...um...out of place i think, but still pretty good, and sense i am a fan of Anne Rice too, i felt at home with stories of vampires. and no, i am not comparing these two writers, you can't.

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Wolfe, McInerney, Dunne . . . Ellis
this book sums up a true american psycho
blah blah boring
Read this now.
the reviewer below me is silly

American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis
Manufacturer: Picador
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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American Psycho (Uncut Killer Collector's Edition)
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Less Than Zero
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ASIN: 033048477X

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Wolfe, McInerney, Dunne . . . Ellis.......2007-06-18

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, is a very well written, even clever, time capsule of affluent New York in the 80s and 90s. Ellis, clearly with his own style, will appeal to those who enjoy Tom Wolfe (especially Bonfire of the Vanities), Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City), Dominick Dunne's portrayal of the wealthy in virtually all of his fiction and any writings on New York in its state of heightened self-importance (coming from a native and long time New Yorker).

Ellis's novel clearly has a twist, a psychotic murderer among its fast moving Wall Street, uptown societal crowd. The protagonist. Written in the first person. At the same time the conspicuous consumption and vacuous living is both revolting and quite funny. Really more the latter. But very realistic given the time frame. Even today, not that much has changed. So, a story within a novel that gives the reader a flavor for a world unto itself, Manhattan.

Ellis's writing is, quite often, crisp, erudite and superb. ". . . there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, and all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have no surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless."

While much of the writing is more of the New Journalistic variety of Wolfe, the above describes the author's protagonist superbly well. The introspection of Bateman there, while deeply flawed, is at the same time, strangely true. All the warnings about the graphic nature of this book not withstanding, it is brilliantly written and a great and disturbingly funny read. It was, strangely, my first read of Ellis, it will not be my last.

this book sums up a true american psycho.......2007-06-06

this book is a true masterpiece. this book is all about how greed can corrupt a person and what it can make them do. Patrick bateman is very offensive, crude, un-predictable and funny at the same time. Sure this book goes on a lot about the little things but that shows you what kind of person pat bateman is. I recommend this book to people over 17 because i read this book at the age of 14 and i was shocked by its content and graphic violence. I read this after seeing the movie and i personally like the book a little more than the fantastic movie. read the book first then see the movie to enjoy the experience better. This is truely an american classic

blah blah boring.......2007-06-02

Controversial? Shocking? Misunderstood? Boring is a little more accurate. The name brand clothing descriptions get real old real fast. The best parts are the critical theories on Genesis and Phil Collins. The movie is a little better. I like the part in the special 80's documentary on the DVD when the editor of Film Comment is interviewed and says about the book, "It's just not that good". Hah!.
If you're into this "genre", whatever it is, check out Hubert Selby's "The Demon".

Read this now........2007-04-21

Let's get one thing clear, American Psycho is a comedy - that needs to be understood before you read it. It's a comedy about yuppies, and how empty-headed and essentially shallow they are, about how far too much money coupled with far too little imagination can cause you to begin to shrink your world, until you live in such a self indulgent cocoon, you cannot even spot the raving, murdering lunatic in your midst. That is effectively what Easton-Ellis is telling us - yes, Yuppies are THAT shallow.

This is a well constructed work; it actually causes the reader to suffer from the same syndrome that grips the minds of most of its characters - only in reverse.

We have the self-obsessed city-boys, only interested in the correct clothing labels and getting reservations at the right restaurant, and us, the readers, obsessing over the violent scenes of rape and murder, and missing the point entirely. The violence and murder are simply incidental to the plot, they are not the point. They serve just the same purpose as a piece of misdirection performed by an illusionist. Just as you look the wrong way, the conjurer pulls a stroke.

Patrick Bateman - the protagonist - is as hilarious as he is twisted; a perfectly tanned, toned and attired Metro-Sexual killing machine; drowning with pleasure in the very selfish excess that he despises, and yet must conform to the rules of. He maintains the required trophy girlfriend and keeps up to date with the latest men's fashion, has membership of the most exclusive fitness club, styles his hair with a surgeon's precision and forces rats into the vaginas of his victims - a man of many tastes, indeed.

His circle of co-accused are just as lacking in any sort of meaningful mental programming, treating the New York they live in as one huge private boys' club, with membership relying on ticking certain financial and fashion based boxes on a seemingly ongoing basis. Most of the men in this work are successful, rich and hilariously stupid, and that is certainly the point. A second point - which feeds the previous one - is that they never step out of the world in which they consume space, therefore never catch a glimpse of their own vulgarity, and consequently, are unable to change for the better, or indeed, want to. They are the small obnoxious building blocks, who together, make the impenetrable wall of arrogance and snobbery that protects their false, built-on-sand world.

Even between themselves, in packs of their own kind, these men are only half aware of each other, do they even know who each other really is? They all have adopted the habit of addressing each other by their surnames, at least a large majority of the time. This is not so worrying until a particular character is introduced, and he starts referring to Bateman by the wrong surname. Why should this be worrying? Because Bateman responds to the surname as if it were correct, unable, due to the particular etiquette at work in their society, to offer a correction. This small, comical component offers to the reader some very disturbing questions about - if you will - the depths of their shallowness. When Bateman addresses an acquaintance, does he use the correct name himmself? Are they just humouring him, shackled by the same etiquette? Is any of the group of friends Bateman surrounds himself with the people he thinks they are?

This question is thrust at the reader, when after killing Paul Allen, a man he has been obsessing over for sometime, Bateman learns that the very same man has been seen in a restaurant in London. This is a confirmed sighting because Bateman is told by his victim's dinner guest, no less! So who on earth has he killed?

This particularly gruesome murder offers Easton-Ellis the chance to have another subtle kick at the world he is cleverly ripping to pieces. The killing happens in Allen's own plush apartment; and upon returning to clean up the mess, Bateman - armed with a surgical mask to cope with the smell - has a brief conversation with a real estate agent who is re-selling the expensive property. The agent spots the surgical mask, and Bateman spots the mysteriously clean apartment. Their brief exchange involves the agent saying she doesn't want any trouble and that Bateman should just go. So he does, walking away from the scene of his crime utterly bewildered, his already fragile mind ever more damaged.

It is exchanges like this that allow us to wonder if Bateman has actually been created by the world he lives in. Is the "Greed is good" culture causing his psychoses? What could happen to a person's view of what's acceptable, when that person lives in world that utterly lacks substance and any shred of morality, a world where even murders can be cleaned up if there's a possibility of profit? Is Bateman the ultimate avenger for the self-indulgence of the slick-haired city boys and their air-head women? It's possible, though I believe that Easton-Ellis lets Bateman loose on this world because he simply thinks they deserve it.

It was people of this kind that Brett Easton-Ellis was mixing with during the second half of the Eighties; he saw their world from the inside, the celebrity and credibility of being a writer allowing him rare access. He has stated that the time spent mixing with New York's Yuppie elite, convinced him that they were the sort of people he would hate to be like; though they certainly left a lasting impression on the man, and this work demonstrates that impression. He didn't like them much.

I said this book is a comedy, and so it is. Consider this scene. Finally snapping and deciding to kill a chap whose attentions our psycho is sick of, he strides into the men's room to confront his intended victim, his black-gloved hands ready to strangle the life out of this irritating man. As Bateman's hands grip the man's throat, the victim starts to smile, feeling the first stirrings of sexual desire. The victim is secretly gay (and must enjoy his own dark pleasures behind closed doors, it's implied, if strangulation turns him on), and Bateman's hands gripping his throat confirm Bateman must be as well. At last, the façade is dropped, now they can be together!

The comedy runs throughout this book. A urinal cake, taken from a men's room, coated in chocolate, and then offered as a present, provides hilarity as the trophy girlfriend attempts to eat it. Bateman dropping his veil of normality and telling people directly what violent acts he'd love to perform on them (no-one really listens to each other, so he gets away with it), whilst the empty heads just nod along, paying no attention. Yeah, yeah, man. Sounds good, let's touch base, oblivious that Bateman is telling them he wants to dig out their eyes. Again, telling us just how dumb and ignorant these people are.

The laughs are there, just so long as you don't allow yourself to be tricked into paying too much attention to the violence. There's plenty of it, and a lot is incredibly graphic, but it's there to catch your eye - to keep you from the seeing reality; just like the soulless drones that populate the book can't see it either, they're too busy obsessing about designer labels to be able to.

Don't do the same about the violence.

the reviewer below me is silly.......2007-03-29

How anyone who has only read 94 pages of a book that is 416 pages, and really believe that they have an accurate view of what the book is about is very, very surprising.
That said, I love this book. I agree at first it is hard to get into, with the long passages about trival details, but after the first 120 pages, the passages of endless fashion detail shorten up. What comes into play when the exposition is through is quite satisfying. Back and forth Ellis takes you through pure halirity(I literally laugh out loud) straight into mind numbing scenes of torture(very graphic), and somehow manages to keep it consistent.
It may take more than one attempt to read, but this book is thoroughly interesting with plenty of action, great dialogue, and a perplexing ending. Highly recommended for those who enjoy fiction on a more graphic scale.

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The Informers
Bret Easton Ellis
Manufacturer: Alfred A. Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Horrifically disturbing, a classic example of what real talent can produce...
Simply Awful!
Don't look at it through your own eyes.
Nobody should LIKE this book.

American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis
Manufacturer: MacMillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Less Than Zero
Lunar Park

ASIN: 0330319922

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Horrifically disturbing, a classic example of what real talent can produce..........2007-06-15

When first skimming through or even reading in entirety the novel `American Psycho' one can made the assumption, wrong as it may be, that it's nothing more than a perverse catalog of sadistic events. Like I said, that assumption is wrong. Bret Easton Ellis is and will always be one of the most intriguing authors of our generation for he knows how to probe the mind with the things we often repel, satisfying our sense with his perversion while telling a story that, if stripped bare of it's disturbing gloss coating would resemble a detailed study on what makes us as a society so horrifying. `American Psycho' is no more a story of a serial killer than it is a story of a lost generation of self absorbed zombies who find more satisfaction and or horror in the detail of a co-workers business card than they do in a meaningful relationship or, yes, a sadistic murder.

The novel succeeds in being utterly spine-tingly due to Ellis' decision to make our psycho, Patrick Bateman (just me or was Ellis going for the obvious `Psycho' throwback...Norman Bates/Patrick Bateman), a first person narrator. In this way the reader not only knows the acts of this man but knows his feelings on the subject. The murders are all horrifying, gut-wrenching and not for the squeamish, but it's really the way in which Patrick recounts the events that are truly repulsive. As has been mentioned, he states everything in a blunt, matter-of-fact type dialog that portrays an air of corrupt morality, as if none of this even matters.

As the reader gets through the bulk of the novel he's forced to question how much of this is reality and how much of this is all in Patrick's head, and that for one is what makes this novel so brilliant. The answers are there but the reader will have to find them on his or her own. Bret refuses to answer the question for us in any point-blank fashion but leaves it to our own imagination and or astute deciphering to uncover the truth in it all. What this allows the reader to do is really probe into the mind of this man and discover he's not so different than us all. It's in this discovery that I was able to truly appreciate Ellis' madness/genius for he was able to take a prose that could and should repulse us all and make it relatable and very close to home. Patrick is a man so absorbed in the media, the pop-obsessed culture we live in that his whole life and purpose can be summed up in a `People Magazine' article. He's so impressed and influenced by what is pressed upon him by television and magazine advertisements that he's become dulled to the reality of the world around him. After reading this novel one is forced to face the idea that we're all just one designer pair of underwear away from slitting someone's throat.

Ellis' use of detailed description has turned some away from this novel. The fact that an entire chapter is devoted to the products he uses to clean himself may appear as needless and redundant but in actuality it proves to be a brilliant way to unravel this mans madness before the brutality of his crimes ensues. This mans mental soundness is brought into question every time he converses with his friends about mundane things such as brands of water and or the font of a specified business card. These men are so dulled as to the real issues at stake that the brutal slaying of a child gets nothing more than a passing remark. It's because of this void of any real feeling that Patrick finds murder and torture so essential for it's the only way he can feel anything. His life would have no meaning otherwise.

Underneath the gritty exterior lies the story of a man not unlike the rest of us. What Ellis has accomplished here is not something to be taken lightly or disregarded as trash for it's far from it. It may take more than the average reader to sit through and uncover what really lies within these pages for this is far from leisure reading. This is above all else a study of human interaction and human relations with each other but more importantly with ones self, and it exposes the power that society and culture impresses on an individual, good and bad. Ellis is in my book a literary genius and has given us one of the most powerful displays of raw talent available in your local bookstore.

Simply Awful!.......2007-01-27

I cannot believe how bad this book is, and I am only on page 94! It is a pointless, rambling piece of garbage. There is no point. Nothing. I am such a huge fan of the movie that I decided to read the book, and I am sorry I did. The movie moved along at a good pace and was fascinating to watch. It was funny, depraved, interesting and horrorfic. The book just rambles along. If you want something that gives ou information on name-brand clothes, restaurants, perfumes, colognes and hair gels and interesting places to visit, this is the book for you. If you are intetested in reading an interesting story, don't waste your time. This book sucks. Go see the movie. Nine out of ten times, the book is always better than the movie - not this one! The book cannot even compare to it.

.......2006-10-25

I don't think this book can be categorised - it is a cruel look at the yuppies of the late 1980's, with big bucks at an early age and a sense that everything is due to them. They are a disrespectful, arrogant and completely out of touch bunch. Just like everyone else they have their darker side, but some take it much further than others, as is the case with fitness/appearances-obsessed Patrick Bateman. At some point I wondered whether his violent outbursts were just a product of his imagination, a sign of his insanity. I found him a weak character despite his status and success - he fails at the most basic human relationships and has lost all sense of touch with reality - I think his violent deliriums are just a way to boost his massive ego and insanity.

Don't look at it through your own eyes........2006-07-20

I've read various Amazon readers' American Psycho reviews over the past couple years and find that most of them either loved or hated the book. Most of them get that the author is using satire and most of them can describe for you a nice summary, including the crux of the work: are those murders real or imagined; that is, is Bateman really a psychotic killer, or is he a harmless loser who takes out his angst against those around him in fantasy? Unless the author one day announces which side Patrick Bateman really falls on, there is plenty of evidence in the book to justify anyone finding reason to believe he indeed was a murderer or a dreamer. All this can be deduced by any reader.

What sets apart, I think, those readers who enjoy the read versus they who loathe it (aside, of course, from they who are simply offended by the graphic violence) is the (lack of) appreciation of point of view. I've heard and read many times that people find the book too distracted by or devoted to abstract and meaningless descriptions of periphery items or situations and by way of monotony. I argue that is the essential element that makes this book work, makes it real. If the objective of any author writing this book were to be simply submit a biographical piece, then he would do what many critics say and supplied just enough arbitrarily descriptive monotony to make the point clear that Bateman is void of real human emotion and moved on with the plot from there. That's not the objective though. The entire point of this book is that you are reading the thoughts, you are inside the mind of a psychotic individual. It is written as a psycopath would write it.

Personally, I am not that bothered by the graphic violence, but I don't care for it either. I think that is all noise. The cream of this book is in the trueness of the point of view (Bateman's narrative, that of a psychopath) Ellis maintains through this endless and seemingly meaningless monotonous descriptions of people, music, products, and paisley ties coupled with Bateman's equal parts insecurity --masked by vanity-- and disgust for his peers, superiors, and inferiors.

Nobody should LIKE this book........2006-07-11

American Psycho is a harsh commentary upon a society dominated by materialism and devoid of emotion, passion, caring or love.

Pat Bateman, the anti-hero of the book, is a suave, sophisticated Wall Street Yuppie. He seems to have it all, the good school, Harvard, the right job, plenty of money, great clothes, a beautiful apartment. He is handsome, fit, rich and is courted by beautiful women.

But from the opening of the book you realise that here is a man who is not living. He exists. And he exists vicariously through brand names, expensive restaurants, personal products. His life is simply a litany of consumption. He is in fact a non-person. Frequently his associates mistake him for other people, and he has trouble telling his associates apart. They are all a homogeneous and indistinguishable set of "in" people.

Bateman describes the murder of a prostitute in the same clinical voice as he uses when he describes the records of Genesis, or the features of his VCR, or how he makes love to his girlfriend, or the clothes and food in the local restaurant. All life is lived in a cold passionless clinical state of semi-awareness.

The lack of a real life is tearing Bateman apart. He searches for a passion, a reality of some kind. In his mind he plays out the murder of beggars, prostitutes and colleagues in vivid detail. But the lines blur. How much is played out in his head and how much is in his mind. Is the Chinese Laundry washing his blood soaked shirts? If not why does he still see stains? At times his violent fantasy world seems to be crossing the border into his daily reality. But how far is this happening?

The only times you see real emotion appear are when Bateman has to interact at a real level with others. He hates live music, why? Live music is emotional in a way records can never be. He is consumed by getting restaurant reservations. He fears having to stand in a crowded restaurant lobby, subject to the vagaries of random people, a situation where he has no control. He is far more comfortable dissecting bodies in his apartment.

So. Is he a murderer, or is it all in his head. At some point are we all a bit like Bateman?

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Glamourama
Bret Easton Ellis
Manufacturer: MacMillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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