American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

From the Publisher

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.

Nora Rawlinson - Library Journal

This review is based on the galley issued by Ellis's original publisher, Simon & Schuster, before it cancelled the book. The book is now going through the editing process at Vintage. There may be some changes in the final version. The indignant attacks on Ellis's third novel will make it difficult for most readers to judge it objectively. Although the book contains horrifying scenes, they must be read in the context of the book as a whole; the horror does not lie in the novel itself, but in the society it reflects. In the first third of the book, Pat Bateman, a 26-year-old who works on Wall Street, describes his designer lifestyle in excruciating detail. This is a world in which the elegance of a business card evokes more emotional response than the murder of a child. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, Bateman calmly and deliberately blinds and stabs a homeless man. From here, the body count builds, as he kills a male acquaintance and sadistically tortures and murders two prostitutes, an old girlfriend, and a child he passes in the zoo. The recital of the brutalization is made even more horrible by the first-person narrator's delivery: flat, matter-of-fact, as impersonal as a car parts catalog. The author has carefully constructed the work so that the reader has no way to understand this killer's motivations, making it even more frightening. If these acts cannot be explained, there is no hope of protection from such random, senseless crimes. This book is not pleasure reading, but neither is it pornography. It is a serious novel that comments on a society that has become inured to suffering.

What People Are Saying

Norman Mailer
The first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes . . . [Ellis] is showing older authors where the hands have come to on the clock . . . He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novelists try for that anymore.

Fay Weldon
Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer [and] American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel. . . The novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly. . . A seminal book.

Katherine Dunn
A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitions, inspiring piece of writing, which has large elements of Jane Austen at her vitriolic best. An important book.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0679735771
  
• ISBN-13: 9780679735779
• Format: Paperback, 416pp
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Pub. Date: March 1991
• Sales Rank: 4,457
• Series: Vintage Contemporaries Series