American psycho

I’m writing this review on my iMac with a 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB of 1600 MHZ DDR3 memory and a 21-inch LED-backlit display with IPS technology. It sits on top of my Antique Walnut HEMNES desk from IKEA and I’m sitting on my IKEA Vilgot swivel chair with handrests (in

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black). I’m wearing a 100% cotton, 3/4-length sleeve Henley shirt in purple, a black cotton-lycra exercise pant and SmartWool socks (all from LL Bean). This morning, the topic on The Jerry Springer Show was dwarves who practice S&M and the women who love them.

I’ve just come back from dinner at L’Auberge, where I had free-range squid topped with ceviche and grape jelly. Tompkins (or someone who looked remarkably like Tompkins but could have been Jenkins) had apricots and lamb in a balsamic vinegar reduction topped with juniper berries and an olive. She was wearing 100% worsted wool pencil skirt and a white silk blouse (all Ralph Lauren) and 6.5″ stiletto alligator leather heels from Christian Louboutin. I’ve got reservations for Bon Temps tomorrow, but the fact that I got reservations makes me think I shouldn’t eat there. I might use my Samsung Galaxy S III with a 4.8 inch HD Super AMOLED (1280×720) display and 4GLTE technology to cancel. I might be able to get into Doria using Tompkin’s name (if that was Tompkins … it could have also been Jensen or Jenkins). But first I’ve got to return my videos.

Now insert 14 paragraphs describing the most vile, depraved, stomach-turning, repulsive, sick-making, stomach-heaving sicko sex and violence that you can imagine and you’ve pretty much gotten the gist of American Psycho.

To say this book had some sick stuff in it is an understatement. I was prepared for that (or thought I was—Bret Easton Ellis has a very very sick mind). What I didn’t expect was the humor. (The “free-range squid” quote is direct from the book—despite the almost mind-numbing descriptions of what everyone is wearing and eating, you can’t skim or you’ll miss some sly wit.) The running joke about how everyone mixes up the identities of everyone else in their social circle was another one that amused me. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

This is a book about a young man (Patrick Bateman—the titular psycho) who works on 1980s-era Wall Street and personifies the Yuppie lifestyle of conspicuous consumption, brand-name clothing, dinners at the latest, trendiest restaurants, clubbing and cocaine. Unlike his contemporaries, Bateman also has another hobby—torture and murder, which he carries out with a chilling nonchalance. And, like everything else in his shallow empty life devoid of any human emotions or connections, he describes it in dispassionate detail. To Patrick, the question of how and when to wear a pocket square and how and where to dispose of the corpse of a decapitated prostitute are given the same attention (with perhaps a bit more passion placed on the pocket square issue). In short, Bateman is a sick fuck. Yet the “joke” of the book is that no one (save for his victims) takes him or his occasional shocking statements (“I’d like to see a woman’s head on a stick”) seriously.

I’m sure (hope? pray?) that Easton Ellis meant this book as a savage indictment/satire of Yuppie culture in Manhattan at a specific place and time. It’s probably why the book is on the list of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. But if you’re going to skip one of those 1001 books, this might a good one. Although it has its moments and it makes it points, it is truly disturbing and I’d have to agree with Stephen King’s opinion on this one:

Do I think that all books and all ideas should be allowed in school libraries? I do not. Schools are, after all, a “managed” marketplace. Books like “Fanny Hill” and Brett Easton Ellis’ gruesome “American Psycho” have a right to be read by people who want to read them, but they don’t belong in the libraries of tax-supported American middle schools.

In other words, proceed with extreme caution.

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I'm giving this a 2 star rating, but it's more like a 1.5... What the fuck is wrong with Bret Easton Ellis? That's all I could think of the whole way through this book, because the violence is beyond anything I've ever read before. I don't think I'll ever recover from the rat scene. And whilst I

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understand the need for graphic scenes to push the novel forward and to make a statement about the yuppie generation...for the love of god, who thinks that sort of shit up?! I read the book in the hopes of understanding the film a bit better. I'm not sure I achieved that aim, though I do have a couple of interpretations. But I found the book quite dull in places, and although I don't always have to like a book's characters I find it hard to feel drawn in when there is not one redeemable feature in a cast of hundreds. I wanted to like this book, as the dark humour of the film was right up my street, but a lot of the time it just felt like an excuse for a misogynist to hide behind a story to air his vile fantasies. And I know authors are not their characters, and in many cases are the pole opposite. But like I said, who thinks that sort of shit up, least of all puts it out there into the world? I feel bad for having some of his other novels on my shelves now.

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Even though I love Bret Easton Ellis, I put off reading this for years because I felt like I already knew what was in it, plus I wasn't sure I could handle the violence. For the first part, I was totally wrong, and for the second... well, I was totally right. I had to read a lot of those sections

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through my fingers, and I'll admit that there were pages I barely even skimmed. And that's probably my own loss -- I don't think the violence was gratuitous, it was just more than I could deal with.

There are so many other fabulous pleasures in this book, though... the chapter about Phil Collins is one of the greatest satires I've ever read. A four hour conversation on a three way phone about where to go to dinner that night? Brilliant.

To me, this book feels like an answer to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and similar stories. Where such classic morality tales imagine humans to have a dual nature, with good and evil always battling for dominance, in Patrick Bateman there is no duality -- he's pure Bateman, all the way through. He doesn't become a different person to commit his crimes -- his crimes are a natural extension of the perfect superficiality and empty striving his society has demanded of him.

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I was reading my way through the BBC Big Read Top 200 books and this was coming up. I knew nothing about it beyond the title. So I casually asked the man with a book stall on our local market if he had any Brett Easton-Ellis. He physically recoiled, and once he had regained the power of speech,

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managed to gasp 'no, I haven't got anything like that'. I backed away, and as I left the stall, he was still muttering to himself 'no, nothing like that', and twitching slightly as though I'd zapped him with a Taser.

A couple of weeks later I got hold of the book, read it, and everything slowly became clear.

To start with I was just irritated by the profusion of italicised text. I 'got' the endless schedules of designer clothing and accessories. They went on a long time but fine, okay, he's being ironic.

Then I got to the first 'Girls' chapter (at first I assumed it was the only 'Girls' chapter, but oh no no no); I was reading it in a branch of Costa Coffee in the middle of a shopping centre. Partway through I had to stop reading and it was like pulling myself up from the bottom of a swamp. Looking up I found myself looking directly at an old dear on the next table, and I immediately thought 'OMG, you would not believe what I've just been reading......'.

A couple of nights later I found I couldn't sleep at all. Images from this book were imprinted on my brain and I couldn't shake them loose. The chapter on Bethany was the worst, but there were others. The book stirred fears in me I didn't even know were there; no kidding, it messed seriously with my head.

This is no-holds-barred horror that makes Stephen King look like a purveyor of amusing tales about overly large spiders. It really really is not for the faint-hearted.

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The further I read this book, the more I realized what a dark satire it was and how brilliantly it was written. Everything in this book that raises the reader's ire *should* do exactly that - from the ethnic slurs to the materialism to the ethnocentrism to the violence to the crass sex. This,

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however, does not make it a fun read. It's the kind of narrative that reminds me of a train wreck - horrible to witness, yet begging to be seen.

I don't know where it comes from, but this book also includes little gems that periodically made me laugh out loud. For example, I liked this...

"Blitzen was a reindeer"
"The only Jewish one," Peterson reminds us.

And there was this...

"...McDermott, in a state of total frustration, asked the girls if they knew the names of any of the nine planets. Libby and Caron guessed the moon. Daisy wasn't sure but she actually guessed...Comet. Daisy thought that Comet was a planet. Dumbfounded, McDermott, Taylor and I all assured her that it was."

Where does the author come up with this stuff?

Another thing that made me laugh about this novel was Patrick Bateman's preoccupation with the newest, most chic material items of his time. This book was first published in 1991. As I read this novel in 2014, I smile to myself at how out of vogue and retro all of his possessions seem now. In reality, not that much time has gone by. That says something profound about the things he valued most at that time.

There was one chapter of a ménage a trois between Patrick Bateman and two women. So much was going on with so many orifices and things going into the various orifices that I could not imagine the configuration of all of these individuals (nor did I want to!). I read that chapter and moved on to the next one.

[American Psycho] is a book that takes other fiction such as [A Clockwork Orange] or [Trainspotting] to the "nth degree". It surpasses them in its ability to be offensive. The issue is that it is very well written and is very readable. Go figure!

I think this book can best be described as "transgressive" fiction, a term which wikipedia defines as "a genre of literature that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways...Unbound by usual restrictions of taste and literary convention, its proponents claim that transgressive fiction is capable of pungent social commentary."

This is true for [American Psycho] which makes quite a statement about materialism, class, and educational status. Is it worthwhile reading? I'd say definitely yes.

What makes the book so readable:
1. shock value
2. the evil human side of us
3. meter - the same sort of rhythm that Chuck Palahniuk uses in his novels
4. the ambiguous ending - THIS IS NOT AN EXIT
5. the tirade against yuppies

One thing I can warn is for NO ONE to pick up this book casually, expecting simply a good read. This is a book that one experiences viscerally as well as mentally. If you think you can handle this while be offended along the way, then go select this book to read.

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When I read this book, I felt mostly bored and annoyed. I actually had to skip two of the chapters where Pat Bateman describes music, I just could not bring myself to care. I suspect that this says more about my ability to appreciate what Ellis was writing than about the actual quality of writing

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itself; if you can keep interested in the book, then I salute you.

What is interesting to me about the book is something that was lost on me when I first read it, and only became notable to me years later. I highlighted it, because it seemed important, but it was only later that I realized why it was important.

"...there is an idea of 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, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing …. "

I think that Patrick Bateman was Ellis's idea of what a Philosophical Zombie would actually be like - or, to put it into more mystical terms - Bateman is a human being without a soul. Currently there is a debate about qualia, about whether or not "what it's like"-ness is reducible to the natural processes of our physical bodies or if we need to appeal to something non-physical to account for subjective experience. The idea, I believe first conceived by Kripke but utilized in arguments by David Chalmers, is that it is possible for a human being to exist and behave like any other human being, but completely lack subjective experience.

I take Patrick Bateman to be both a critique and a conception of P-Zombie. On the one hand, his entire existence is surface and external. He does not have an inner life, he fixates on external details like clothes, appearance, style, popularity, and cannot find any kind of personal judgments of his own. He thinks in terms of what is popular and fashionable, but does not bring any opinion of his own to the table. In this sense, he is a P-Zombie in Chalmer's conception, he behaves just like us, but he's dark inside. He is not really there.

On the other hand, he's a sadistic mass-murdering cannibal and rapist. This is not typical among me and those that I know, but your experience may vary. In this sense, I think he's a critique of Chalmer's conception, he shows that somebody with no inner subjective experience would be unable to behave like a human being. He would become cruel and bestial because he would just be reacting mechanically to stimuli: he would fall back on humanity's baser instincts of hunger, sex, and violence (read the book and ask yourself what percentage of the book is about restaurants, physical attractiveness and rape, and murder and torture. It has to be at least 85%).

I think that Bateman is meant to be an idea of a human being without a soul, but Ellis does not agree that such a person would behave like anyone else. I am ignoring for the time the critique of 1980s Yuppie culture because I am not that interested in a critique of 1980s Yuppie culture. It is this idea of a dark-inside man that I think is interesting, and it's one that makes me think I'll give this book another read sometime soon.

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Made me laugh so hard I had to run out and slaughter a banker.

Truly excellent satire. The rest of his stuff is so so. Was cocaine involved in the writing?

A portrait of 1980s yuppie consumerism at it's worst, this satirical novel highlights the evils of excess in American culture. It is a society where wealth equals respect, and its participants are devoid of real emotion, living numb and empty lives. Patrick Bateman, a rich Wall Street VP, immerses

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himself in designer clothing, ridiculously expensive meals, high-roller parties, and video stores. He spends his boring existence obsessed with complicated hygiene rituals, finding the next woman ("hardbody") to date, sniffing coke, and rattling off the latest fashion tips and trends. He can buy anything but happiness, so in order to feel, Bateman resorts to extreme and sadistic violence, including rape, torture, murder, and even cannibalism. As the ugliness grows, his lunacy breeds absolute mayhem; the sex is pornographic and humiliating, and the disgusting violence is hard to stomach. Ellis presents the novel as Bateman's stream of consciousness, and there were times that I got bogged down by the constant branding and name dropping. Some readers may despise this novel, and normal people WILL be offended by the graphic descriptions, but it's hard to miss the substance. This is one of the strongest critiques of late 20th century American society and of the results of materialistic culture on the human spirit that I've ever read.

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This is not your typical crime story, and Patrick Bateman is not your typical killer. There is no mysterious invisible character with a clever name taunting the police through notes and purposefully left clues at the scenes of crimes. There is no killer walking around babbling constantly about his

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issues with mother or about being possessed by a dragon (though there are hints of both types of behavior). This is mainly just Patrick Bateman, our faithful narrator, leading us through his lifestyle to our amusement and horror. It's not for money or fame, he just likes it -- it comes naturally to him. That is if, as the reader, you choose to believe that all of the things he tells you about and shows you are real, as there are clues that it could be either... or both.

When the story starts, we're already thrust into his world. Wall Street, shmoozing over dinners and drinks, shallow shells comparing business cards and one-upping each other over who has the best stereo. His world borders on boring with its wealthy mundaeity. But this is told to the reader purposefully, deliberately. It's a facade, and the real world begins to crack and you suddenly find yourself recoiling at what's beneath.

Even though Bateman is 26 when we join him at the beginning of the book, this life of his has been going on in this way for some time. It's truly frightening and it makes you afraid for every person that he interacts with, like something could happen at any moment. This purely fearful feeling drives the first part of the novel, as Bret Easton Ellis doesn't indulge in the constant urge to show a lot of gore so much as to hint at it and allude to it, giving you the sense of death always lurking. When he does finally indulge in gore, it reaches a level of horror worthy of the oft-casually used word "psycho."

Perhaps more subtle but no less terrible is this rising sense that everyone around Patrick is also crazy. This world of Wall St. and high rollers is foreign to me, but it feels so vivid and authentic. The psychosis and sociopathy seems so saturate everything. Plus, since it's not a "cop drama" and there seems to be no good guys consistently throughout (and thus nobody to bring Patrick to justice), there's a dark void while reading it where normally would be a sense of hope. I don't want to give anything away that you wouldn't see on a dust jacket, though.

Overall I was surprised by all the nuance and subtlety, and the language draws you in. I found myself sympathizing with the most unsympathetic people ever. I was repulsed and drawn at the same time, it fascinated and horrified me the entire way.

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A friend of mine found this book lying around one day and gave it to me because I've been wanting to read it for some time now...having seen the movie and all. I'm glad to say that it turned out to be one of the most gruesome and horrifying books I've read to date.

Ellis pretty much gives a big old

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"screw you" to American Capitalism and life in the late 80s. It is a very interesting take on corporate America and how greed and consumerism can create this overall monster that consumes everything...including people (both literally and figuratively in the case of Patrick Bateman).

The first third of the book moves pretty slowly, but picks up steam as Bateman continues to lose his grip on reality. There are some pretty graphic and disgusting scenes that take place...so it will please horror nuts (like me). But, I think the disgusting scenes are a perfect metaphor for the horrible things that happen in the real world. The overall negative tone of the book should make people question humanity and certain systems like Capitalism. Is Bateman correct in assuming that things can not change in the world and that we are constantly stuck in its overall systems..."This is not an exit?"

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I really don't care if some people find this book horrifying, as I actually find it borderline genius. This is not about decent people trying to make a living. This is a story about self-absorbed yuppies who agonize over designer clothes, personal hygiene rituals, power lunch wars and business card

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stationery. Taking it to an absolute extreme, Ellis chooses to symbolize the blatant boredom and bleakness of such a lifestyle by creating a psychopath killer: Pat Bateman. And a psycho he truly is - Bateman is the narrator of the book, but he might as well have been referring to someone else he never met in the other side of the planet. His detachment, his flat tone, his coldness - Ellis combines all these elements to create a portrait that is at the same time surreal and completely believable.

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After roughly two years of putting it off, I finally made my way through this book, and even after all that anticipation and interest, I'm not at all sure what to make of this.

It's rather unlike any book you're ever going to read: it's populated with a group of characters that, for any number of

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reasons, are greatly dislikable; it features details and minutiae that border on soporific; and there is little plot that isn't driven by the insane, horrific ravages of our psychopathic narrator, Patrick Bateman.

Granted, it's a testament to Ellis's focus that the acts Bateman perpetrates -- in shockingly graphic detail, doing things that should probably never even be imagined much less written down -- are so quickly dulled by the documentary-style listing of the designers of the clothes of his compatriots. But what's frustrating about this book is that, amidst the punctuations of gory violence, there is little progression or development of plot, just a not-so-subtle indictment of the repetitive blandness of yuppie culture.

It's only after most of the novel has taken place that both the reader and Bateman himself begin to question his mental state, and one can't help but wonder if it's too late. Of course, if that total immersion -- and the subsequent surrender of all sense of sanity and interest -- is the point, then Ellis has certainly succeeded.

I'm just not convinced that this is as much an effective satire as it is a graphic and startling indictment of consumer culture and the potential consequences of alienation. And I'm not convinced it's that so much as it's the tale of a truly crazy man who acts on his grotesque fantasies in order to escape the boredom of his life.

American Psycho tries to be all of these and I don't quite think it hits all those marks -- but one thing is for sure: this is one novel that will leave an indelible mark on you for a very long time.

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I went into this expecting something along the lines of Hubert Selby Jr.'s "The Demon" ("normal" guy goes off the deep end and increasingly goes more and more ape shit crazy - type of thing). It wasn't. Bateman was ape shit crazy from the beginning. And the writing was much better than I expected.

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I had to get used to the repetitiveness of the descriptions of what everyone was wearing, but I understand the point he was making. The violence was not shocking. It should have been, but nothing is really shocking today. That says a lot about our culture. I didn't really like the ending. And someone on the back had a quote about this being "Dostoevskian". I disagree. That is like someone calling a book "Kafkaesque" because it has some weird story of a person transforming into some bug or creature, when Kafka's major theme was the absurdity of bureaucracy and man.

I liked the way Ellis always had them confusing people with each other and calling each other the wrong names. It put emphasis on how much they were all alike (dressed alike, spoke alike, went to the same places) and also made it more shocking that Bateman could seem so much like them but in reality be so completely different (and no one noticed).

In a previous review for a Johnson book, I stated that, frustratingly, there are only a few talented writers living today. Of course that is not true, what I was trying to say is that only a few writers living today "reach" me or "touch" me in a certain way. There are many talented writers living today, Vollmann, Pynchon, Eggers being a few. And I would safely place Ellis in this category as well.

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Patrick Bateman seems to have it all. Wealthy, Ivy League education and high paying job in Manhattan. He lives the quintessential 80's yuppie life. Going from one trendy restaurant or night club to the next with his equally well heeled friends and array of girlfriends. To all appearances Patrick

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has it made and seems to his friends to be a great guy with an offbeat sense of humor. But Patrick is much more than he seems. A woman hating psychopath with incredibly sadistic urges. He descends from one horrific act to the next in a never ending spiral of violence and death.

American Psycho isn't for the faint of heart or the squeamish. The misogyny, racism and increasing brutality become increasingly disturbing as the book goes on. The novel does raise the interesting question of how much of what we show people is real versus how much we are really hiding. Patrick Bateman covers himself in a minute expertise of musical pop culture, couture clothing and light banter to deflect the fact that on the inside he is a depraved monster. There are no easy answers as the reader must determine how much of Patrick's life, public and private are real and how much is imagination.

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It seems that the last few books that I have looked at don't seem to be the type of books that Christians should be reading. American Psycho clearly falls into that category, but on another hand it is one of those books that removes the thin veneer of respectability from society to show it at its

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most horrendous. American Psycho is about sex and violence, and in particular how interconnected sex and violence are. There is also a lot of drugs flowing around the world of American Psycho, and all of this occurs within the upper professional class of New York. In fact the main character is a very well respected member of the New York elite, and when he finally confesses, everybody laughs at him and tells him to stop being silly.
What is quite disturbing about this book is how Ellis easily links both sex and violence and how the pleasure that sex brings slowly morphs into the pleasure of causing pain to another person. In fact, one minute one is reading a rather explicit sex scene, and before we know it, he is murdering his victim in a passion of ecstasy. All of this is done in a drug haze as well, mostly cocaine (which is the wealthy person's drug).
There is no method, rhyme, or reason to his killing. He does not do it because of some jealous hatred of womankind, and in fact his victims are not limited to women, though a lot of them are because they are the ones he is able to lure back into his apartment. The only time he gets close to being caught is when he kills a homeless man and is spotted by a police officer, and thus a chase ensure (and remember, he doesn't get caught in this book. He attempts to confess but nobody believes him).
We never know his actual occupation, only that he works on Wall Street and that he is wealthy. He could be anybody, any one of us. This book shows us the dark side of the American Dream, and he is living it. Being one of the wealthy, while not necessarily being above the law, he certainly is able to avoid its worse implications. This book shows us freedom at its worst, where we are free to do what we want, including inflicting pain onto another person.
This is a very disturbing book, but in another sense it was incredibly fascinating. While I was not drawn into the violent scenes, the way that Ellis merges the pleasure of sex to the horror of violence, you tend not to have any choice. Yes, he is very explicit and very descriptive, but he does that for a reason. We are supposed to get caught up into the horror, to wake up with blood on our hands, and to ask ourselves what this world really does hide behind closed doors.

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Spoiler Alert!

This is absolutely not the sort of book that stands up to multiple readings. I remember being blown away by this book in the early '90s. And this re-reading was a mixture of tedium, disgust tossed in with the roller coaster ride that I recall from back then. So the 4 stars here are a

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compromise between the 5 I would have given then and 3 that was my first impulse this time.

Having said that, Patrick Bateman is a character that gets seared into your brain, the only analog I can think of being Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Is he hallucinating? Did he actually slaughter everyone he said he did? You don't know. But the off-balance way multi-page long discourses on Whitney Houston, stereo equipment, Genesis, etc., are worked into the plot gives the whole work a sort of crazy realism. To say nothing of the endless descriptions of '80s fashion, housewares and the chicest of restaurants...worked into what may be the goriest, nastiest, foulest descriptions of murders you'll ever read in fiction.

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A tour de force in brutal language and imagery, "American Psycho" is breath-taking. The clinically detached narration of a murderer is hardly a new concept, but never has it been so brilliantly executed as in Ellis' novel. Horrifically funny and ironic from the amount of cream and lotion Pat

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applies to his face each morning to the raincoat he puts on to prevent his clothing from being stained by blood as he axe-murders one of his acquaintances.

This is not an easy book to read, nor should it be; it is a blindingly strong statement about the American culture's insensitivity to suffering and the promoted worthlessness of human life. Most find it overly graphic and patently disturbing. This book chronicles a man who has everything, and has reached the point where his only pleasure stems from taking away what others have, even to the point where their lives become just another of those possessions. While many are quick to focus on the explicit gore in the novel-- which is only natural, considering the impression it leaves on the reader's mind-- this book has a great deal more to it. The social critique speaks for itself, but perhaps it takes a certain type of person to see the (jet) black comedy in plotting to kill a man for having an elegant business card.

Bateman puts just as much energy into describing his lifestyle as he does to his murders; the insights he offers into this peculiarly American culture are fascinating. This is a gripping and disturbing book, even if it isn't for the squeamish.

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If you think the film was even the least bit dull, don't even bother going into this book. Advertised as the most gruesome work of fiction and a book that makes you excited and happy to know what happens next, American Psycho basically offers you words you couldn't care less about over and over and

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over and dialogues between oh so handsome rich men. And our main character is a dick.
Yeah I know. What to expect from a psychopath right?

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OK - the story has no beginning, no end, no real plot. The characters are two-dimensional vacuous, self-absorbed, non-entities lacking any redeeming features. The first-person narrative mostly consists of nth-detail descriptions of what designer brands people are wearing and the dialogue mainly

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revolves round arguing over which overpriced NYC restaurant is the most hip. Scattered throughout are sickeningly graphic descriptions of torture and murder. Oh, and lengthy reviews of the discographies of several 80's bands - the likes of Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis...

So just what does make this such an amazing and gripping book?

First off, its not the violence - you need to have an element of suspense or fear to make literary violence thrilling in any way - in short you have to care. Here there is a cold, mechanical, pointlessness to it all. Eventually even the protagonist, Wall Street yuppie Patrick Bateman, fails to get any gratification from killing.

The book is first person account in the words of the psychopath Bateman, with the factual ambiguities that insanity brings. Events are ambigous or contradict each other and there are some tangential moments of complete surreal fantasy. You are never quite sure what is real and what is a fabrication of Bateman's mind - that uncertainty just kind of draws you in.

The joy of the book for me was twofold; there is the first person account of insanity, varying from the amusing to the downright sickening, but ultimately fascinating. Even better is the viscious stab the book makes at modern materialism and the pointless pursuit of status. Bateman and his peers are for the main, designer-suited yuppie stereotypes that I could not help but enjoy seeing getting character-assassinated here. Parts of the book are really very funny, very black, comedy.

If I had any problem with the book, the description of the violence is really sometimes just too much, especially the nasty mysogynistic sexual stuff. I think the book would have worked just as well without much of the graphic horror.

Anyway, maybe not for the prudish or faint hearted, but you'd be missing out on an amazing book!

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Brilliant and awful. I couldn't put it down and, at the same time, couldn't wait for it to end.

'Price is wearing a linen suit by Canali Milano, a cotton shirt by Ike Behar, a silk tie by Bill Blass and cap-toed leather lace ups from Brooks Brothers. I'm wearing a lightweight linen suit with pleated trousers, a cotton shirt, a dotted tie, all by Valentino Couture, and perforated cap toe

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leather shoes by Allen Edmonds. Van Patten is wearing a double breasted wool and silk sport coat, button fly wool and silk trousers with inverted pleats by Mario Valentino, a cotton shirt by Gitman Brothers, a polka-dot silk tie by Bill Blass, and leather shoes from Brooks Brothers. McDermott is wearing a woven linen suit with pleated trousers, a button down cotton and linen shirt by Basile, a silk tie by Joseph Abboud, and ostrich loafers from Susan Bennis Warren Edwards.'

If you enjoyed that you'll love this book as it is repeated hundreds of times throughout.

It is insanely boring to read, and must have been to write, in fact the author, at about the 2/3 mark, starts to list all the clothes being from the same maker more often.

Another passage, I'm not making this up, is 7 pages of toiletries used that morning, by 1 person.

Reads like someone took every grocery list they ever made, stapled them together and wrote page numbers on them.

The writing is amateurish, the dialog seems spontaneous and contrived at the same time and difficult to follow.

There's nothing interesting about any of the characters.

The book is pointless.

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i wish I'd never laid eyes on this book. Absolutely repellent in every way.

i have a love/hate relationship with Ellis. i was bored nearly to tears by the first 50 pages of this book (my first by him – I of course knew of the movie, but had never seen it). it just seemed to be a lot of names – of characters, expensive designers and popular restaurants from the mid

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‘80s – and a lot of vapid conversation about the aforelisted. I set it aside for about a month, then picked it up again on a whim. Once i realized the incessant listing of what each and every character was wearing helped develop Bateman’s psyche, and got very into this novel.
…then, the murders, torturing and gore began. I knew it was coming and had (from the movie’s reputation) thought I was prepared – I was not. This is by far the goriest thing I have read or seen. The detail and creativity of this monster is admirable in a horrifying way. I stopped reading for a week at a time on two separate occasions because I couldn’t take the nightmares it was giving me.
I toughed it out and finished the book and recommend it to anyone who thinks they can stomach it.

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Few writers exemplify a time and place like Bret Easton Ellis. His books ARE the 1980's, and this sickening dark comedy of manners chronicles the pinnacle of that decade's preoccupations. Read this book at your own risk: this is not an exit.