American Psycho

American Psycho is wwild-wild-wild. It's one of the best studies of a psycho killer ever written. Those other serial killer books, like Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal and even The Stranger Beside Me (Revised and Updated): 20th Anniversary do not understand how warped and twisted a serial killer is. Ellis does. He gets it. He gets that a serial killer, Patrick Bateman, is so shallow that he's the sunlight bouncing off the oil slick on a rancid puddle. Damn, but Ellis is good. He's so good that this book bounced around publishers because normal people can't believe how twisted a serial killer is. Ellis uses the serial killer to play off 1980s NYC, but that's secondary to his damn-fine characterization.

Damn, but I need a cup of coffee. This ain't coming out right.

American Psycho is American, but it's also Psycho. Read the book. It's a deep character study, and I like thost, like Rabid: A Novel or Time's Arrow.

The Bookeater!

I saw American Psycho, the movie, when it first came out with a friend of mine. i have only laughed out loud twice at the movies, and my friend and i were perhaps the only two doing so. Other people just didnt seem to understand it. so finally nearly ten years later now, i see the book at the library and decide to see how it compares. i was not disappointed. there are multiple ways of interpretting this book, all basically covered in the reviews here. this book is terribly violent, but it is not a horror in my mind. just as "City of God" was so much more than the violence that it displayed. the violence is a necessity. if that sort of thing is not your thing, then dont read the book. you can say that what the book tries to say is cliche - oppulence, bad; superficiality, bad; society going down the toilet, etc. but i look at pat bateman, either who he actually is or who he desires to be, as part of all of us. the worst of what we all are taken to the extreme to show it to us. when we can and do have it all, what's next if not more boredom. all our lives are just the search for happiness, avoiding boredom. we all either distract ourselves from this mess or avidly pursue it. both really. so what can we learn about what we are doing. that is the question that one has to ask themselves after reading this book. perhaps the theme has been used before, but i feel that this book does a fantastic job at awakening thoughts in oneself that are very important to contemplate.

also, i want to say that this book is readable not just because of the message and commentary that is thought provoking. it is the humor that makes it truely readable. i have read many a book that is supposed to be the greatest work of fiction of all time that says so many new things, bla bla bla. this book like every other book says the same thing, maybe in a new way relating to new societal situations, but the same really. it is the constant humor that makes this book special. it is funny on every page. no one knows anyone's names; people disappear but someone saw them, but not really; the obsessive detail in description of clothes, music, etc. this book is great because it is a marvelous satire filled with meaning. nothing compares to the brilliance of satire in my opinion.

There are nearly eleven hundred reviews of "American Psycho" posted here, but in the spirit of '80s excess, there's always room for one more. Simply put: this is one of the funniest, bleakest, and most clever novels I've ever read. I've had copies of it since ever it first appeared at the start of the 1990s, and I've given copies to many a friend and girlfriend over the years. I always tell people that reading "American Psycho" cost be hundreds and hundreds of dollars, since I *had* to have Patrick Bateman's hair and skin care products (I could never have afforded his suits,let alone dinner at Dorsia). "American Psycho" is...well...Jane Austen with power tools: an arch and knowing riff on the opening of "Pride and Prejudice": a young gentleman with a seven-figure income must be in need of...constant social approbation and...victims. The brilliant business-card scene, the barrage of grotesque menu items, the utter indifference to individual identity as opposed to display items--- "American Psycho" is a comedy of manners better than Wilde or Wodehouse, and at least as good as Austen (and the sex scenes are...vur' hot).

Netlix and downloads have ruined Patrick's all-purpose excuse of "I have to return some videotapes", but Patrick's life and world (and even his utter lunacy) are still worth exploring through repeated readings. And how else would we learn about the wonders of Huey Lewis...or that Bono is the Devil? "American Psycho" is too hilarious and dead-on not to read again and again.

And...am I the only one who's noticed that Christian Bale's take on Bateman in the (underrated) film is an exact riff on Tim Matheson's character from "Animal House" (same voice, same inflections, same jawline)?

I believe that it is about time that critics and readers worldwide were let in on the great lie embedded in the cultural subtext of "American Psycho". This lie is perpetrated for whatever artistic reason Bret Easton Ellis has found fit. The novel has inveigled millions of readers to an interpretation of human nature as base and groundless in intrinsic value. It has furthermore convinced them of the state of nature and the true face of mankind. It attempts to pull back the veil and show human beings as baseless creatures, convinced of the power of their own egos. Patrick Bateman doesn't merely imagine killing women and street gutter hobos, the book makes-good his thoughts. Patrick Bateman brutalizes and maims people with little to no falter into the realm of realism. This is no science fiction novel of a wicked, futuristic and cannibalistic society. This book establishes the ever evolving pathos of Patrick Bateman as a wickedly remorseless and fully-self-invested id. Patrick Bateman kills people, he enjoys it, and as the book progresses he develops a pathos that is stark in its depictions of radically violent behavior. The realizations of snuff porn-like violence has a poignant and rather upsetting realism to it that describes the sexual gratification of pure violence. Both of them are equally wicked and ungratifying comments of the human being. What most of the readers, and professed fans of the novel do not focus on, is the very real possibility that Patrick Bateman is, in truth, an idiotic coward who slums about in his wicked psyche pondering various painful ways to destroy a human being. The truth is different however. Patrick does not commit any radical acts of violence, instead he merely resides in the basement of his primal bestial urges, without act. He is a powerless pervert. That this is a commentary on the uncommon power of the rich, the ability to supersede societal laws and norms, is not license to condemn general society along with the free radicals of the bunch, like Patrick Bateman. We have no more emotional connection to the persons that he kills than to the various characters that populate his life, characters better described simply as those he does not kill. Patrick Bateman's whole world is pure fantasy. What is dangerous and unbecoming to society is the interpretation that Patrick Bateman killed people, and no one cared. This dangerous emotional pivot takes the better part of mankind's positive and generous nature grinding it into a chunky bone meal of blood and ichor. This vile character is a despicable anti-hero and representative of the modern man. A being who has forsaken value and concern because the great satirist, Nietzsche chided mankind for its more puerile motivations. These are the leftover intellectual products of Nazi thinking, dressing Nietzsche up in a clown suit for the Nazi propaganda machine. Patrick Bateman, the novel professes, is the modern creature. Bret Easton Ellis is simply an iconoclast that picks off easy targets and radicalizes them without fleshing them out as interesting material. They are all impulse. It bores me and makes me vaguely ill, that such an imagination, as Ellis obviously has, may find these as important and essentially gratifying illustrations of where mankind's condition. Bret Easton Ellis, despite this, has hesitated to comment on the character or the prevailing motif of the novel. We are left in tow with an interpretation that is horribly inconsistent to general social temper. What bothers me most is the feeling that the world, as defined by Ellis, is terribly nihilistic spilling over into absolute antipathy. That critical readers embrace this interpretation with a certain type of relish, advancing it as an epiphanic statement concerning mankind, is nauseating. Ellis writes with such conviction and ardor that it appears that he wholeheartedly embraces this intellectual understanding. This is not merely social commentary, or at best, satirical dance, for Ellis, this is real sport. Sure he has caricature stuffed into almost every page of the novel, but Ellis describes everything from violence to Versace clothing with almost lavish, religious aplomb. You can feel that he enjoys writing this novel. This is frightening. I don't like Patrick anymore than I like Ellis. This is not to say that Ellis is a despicable human being for writing this novel, it just makes him a lot less relevant. Ellis owes an apology to his readers as well as to the human creature for painting it in such garishly angry tones. You can get by with a lot less cynicism in your life if you pass this novel by. If you don't, its not that you won't like the novel, you very well may, I don't know, people's tastes are peculiar. Perhaps you will get rewarded for writing a review like mine, or not, either way the novel is impressive, insofar as it is a massively negative portrayal of the human being. If you like that, get it, if you don't, don't.

Repetition of boring or dusgusting scenes come after each other in this "literary" work. The writer was clearly out of ideas and stuck to the formula "gore+boredom+fashion tips from eighties (really?)" I only started to read this book because friend of mine said that's it's the only book that he could not finish because of gore and another one said that he couldn't finish it because it was so boring.
seriously, don't waste your time, whatever the autor was "trying" to say can be paraphrased "I was a yuppy and I hated it," spend the 10 dollars on ice-cream.