Product 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #759 in Books
• Published on: 1991-03-01
• Released on: 1991-03-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

From 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 (see News, p. 17; Editorial, p. 6) 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. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/90 and 12/90.
- Nora Rawlinson, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Inside Flap Copy
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.

About the Author
Bret Easton Ellis is the author of Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, The Informers, and Glamorama.  He was born in 1964 and raised in Los Angeles.  He is a graduate of Bennington College and lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

A Nightmarish Comedy of Manners
American Psycho is Bret Easton Ellis' grotesque comedy about the decadent underbelly of Wall Street culture in the 1980s, as experienced firsthand through protagonist Patrick Bateman. The book is the only example I have read of controlled and literate obscenity. Few books demand their readers to both laugh and cringe in disgust. Ellis accomplishes this by combining a Zeitgeist protagonist (as Fyodor Dostoevsky does in Notes from Underground), a comedy of manners (consider a very twisted Jane Austen), and the 1980s American height of materialism and capitalism.

The novel is not as overwhelming as all of that sounds, because Ellis is a fantastic teacher. He eases you into the themes of the overall satire he is attempting to compose, so that when the first shock comes, at least you have been partially primed for the graphic imagery it conjures.

One of the novel's constant jokes concerns excruciating details about the brand names of the material possessions in Bateman's vicinity and, sometimes, his judgments of the people who own those possessions. Ellis does a great job helping the reader plow through the barrage of high-end designer labels and features of new-fangled gadgets by writing the novel in an exuberant and often manic first person, present tense narrative. Almost all fiction is written in past tense, and it's refreshing for Ellis to try something few attempt, and to do it well.

I found that reading the book out loud makes the humor rise from the page, especially during the scenes when Bateman endlessly catalogues the contents of his purchases from an upscale store or the respective entrées of his friends while they dine at a trendy restaurant. I did not read the gruesome scenes of rape, torture, and murder out loud, however. I admit that I didn't want to get too close to those words.

I initially thought that the book was too long. Almost everything that is going to happen occurs within the first 250 pages of the book, and the rest of the novel (with the exception of the final 30 pages) is comprised largely of variations on the themes. In short, I started to get slightly bored, and I thought maybe the book wasn't as well written as I had thought. Then I realized that Bateman, too, was getting bored and it hit me: I've become as desensitized as the protagonist. It's then that I understood clearly one of the novel's powerful understatements: Any of us has the potential to be Patrick Bateman. Certainly, such a notion isn't likely to be rendered real, but it does mean that Bateman is operating within the scope of humanity; granted, he's at the division between human and demon. It also means that the length of the text is perfect.

In the end, Ellis wants his readers to understand that life reduced to overpriced suits and food, designer drugs and bottled water, un-spendable amounts of wealth, ultra metrosexuality and obsessive health consciousness, and mind-numbing and soul-crushing careers are in fact the polite and fashionably correct equivalents of rape, torture, and murder. The reader is left to decide what to do about it.

Its all about the clothes.
I'm guessing that this book was suppose to be about Bateman living in a society where everyone is fake. But all I got out of it was whole chapters on Whintey Huston and several pages out of fashion magazines. Along with the graphic scences and odd writing style, this book is very hard to get into.

Worth reading even if you don't like the genre
Truthfully this is a brutal book about a psychopath. It is also a compulsively readable book. I find violent movies and violent books repulsive as a rule, but sometimes I come across one and give in and read it. And then put it down as unbearable because the story or the character is not good enough to outweigh my revulsion at the topic. I guess I have a nervous stomach or a vivid imagination. I know the genre has it's fans and I don't want to denigrate that.
American Psycho was an exception for me. I put it back on my wish list to remind myself that this is a book I plan to re-read. I also want to read other books by Brett Easton Ellis.