American Psycho
1991
- gothic & horror
- literary fiction
- capitalism
- postmodernism
- id
- schizophrenia
- consumerism
- stream of consciousness
- cocaine
- pop music
The story
American Psycho is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story is told in the first person by Patrick Bateman, a serial killer and Manhattan investment banker. Alison Kelly of The Observer notes that while "some countries [deem it] so potentially disturbing that it can only be sold shrink-wrapped", "critics rave about it" and "academics revel in its transgressive and postmodern qualities".
What it’s like
Cold, glossy and relentlessly detailed, the prose catalogues designer suits, restaurant tables, business cards and pop albums with the flat precision of a showroom inventory, every surface gleaming under the hard white light of 1980s Manhattan. The voice is first person and fastidious, a narrator who rates a dinner's wine list as seriously as he rates a murder, so the mood is sardonic, numb and queasily funny, a satire that goes cold in the stomach. Its rhythm is restless: long digressive riffs on Huey Lewis, Whitney Houston and mineral water alternate with abrupt, clinical scenes that drop the reader straight into brutal, graphic violence, and sexual content is frequent and explicit. Expect repeated episodes of torture and gore described in unsparing detail, so this is anything but gentle. The emotional register is detachment bordering on dread, with a man so hollowed by surface and status that his inner life turns into a blank the reader keeps trying to fill. It suits a late, alone reading session for those who enjoy bleak social satire, postmodern unreliability and prose that is deliberately hard to sit with.
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