American Psycho

Horrifying book. Mr. Ellis has a masterpiece, the original book. Thank you: Ronnie Reagan, Wall Street, New York, Materialism, Racquet Clubs, Phil Collins, and of course Huey Lewis and The News. Great book and also a fantastic film. Christian Bale cut his "American" cinema teeth off of this book. The film & book do differ greatly. READ THE BOOK FIRST. If you a film addict and literate then watch the movie.

I don't even know where to start in describing this horrific, terrifying, wonderfully written novel. Well, I guess I just have.
I started and finished this book in August of this year, and it was a very rewarding experience. It really brought me into the horror genre, a genre I really had no interest in before.
Patrick Bateman is an amazing character, his dialog and his thoughts and dreams are funny, horrific, and just plain witty. It's tremendously fun to sit behind Bateman's eyes and read his day-to-day activities.
Nothing really happens for the first half of the book, most of the time Bateman is just hanging out with "friends" or watching porn, but even in these seemingly bland sections Ellis' writing really draws you in.
An amazing book by an equally amazing author, but not for the faint of heart.

American Psycho satirizes the status-obsessed designer-label contemporary American consumer culture at the same time that it does a better job than any horror novel of depicting the personality of a psychopath. Sadly, we realize that Patrick Bateman's killings are his only way to retain a connection to human life and to an individual identity, and in the end we aren't even sure he has managed to maintain that. This is a great book to read only if you have the stomach to wade through the many incredibly gruesome sex and death scenes.

AP is hardly Ellis' better work. The idea behind the satire is brilliant, but 400 + pages is just aggrivating. One thing the length accomplishes is it completes the "emptiness of excess" theme; but is that really worth the aggrivating length. So much of the dialogue and the narration seems repetitive. If you jump around in the book you'll find a lot of chapters that are just like ones you have already read. Pretty lame. Also, a lot of chapters take scenes right of Less Than Zero and simply slap new names on the characters, who are in indeed flat and fungible... Very, very lame.

Ellis got so much right with Less Than Zero; the stripped down minimalism, the metonymy, the irony and black humor. AP just rants. It isn't even the violence of the book that bothers me, it is just the endless emphasis on pointless minutia. If you really think critically about the book's satire it makes an interesting statement, albeit tired and cliche by now, but it really doesn't all say that much - materialism is bad, corporate domination breeds institutional violence, the elite are often elite out of privilege and not because they are actually intilligent, moral human beings. This is not a new idea.

Still, the book is funny, and has its moments. The movie, however, and I rarely say this, is immeasurably better.

American Pyscho is terrific horror. This classic book is set in Manhattan 1980's. The author Bret Easton Ellis goes deep into the pyche of an inhumane serial killer.
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