Book Of The Issue

Love him or hate him, Bret Easton Ellis refuses to be ignored. As the American Psycho author gets set to publish his first novel in 13 years, Claire Sawers rates it a juicy, sinister and entertaining return

Midway through Bret Easton Ellis’ new novel, 17-year-old Bret is about to pitch a script to a randy old Hollywood movie producer with a lust for underage boys. Teen Bret mentally sketches out the plot: ‘a boy, his friends, young people in LA, sexy, a little bi, drugs, someone is killed, there’s a chase, violence and bloodshed, a mystery the boy solves or maybe not.’ And with that, in one of many metafiction moments, his rough synopsis also doubles as a handy précis for The Shards, Ellis’ first novel since Imperial Bedrooms in 2010.

Of course, real-life author Bret and narrator Bret share similarities; they both went to the exclusive Buckley High School, their parents divorced when Bret was a teenager, and their highschool dream was to become a writer. The lines between memoir and fantasy are deliberately messy with Ellis dipping into his own memories (often finding it very triggering) for dramatic effect.

The Shards is an LGBT coming-of-age tale blurred fabulously with a gory slasher-horror thriller as young Bret fixates both on mysterious new boy Robert Mallory and a serial killer called The Trawler. Grown-up Bret, a film obsessive who has spent chunks of his career in screenwriting, goes for the same ‘tits and terror’ formula of many horror directors. He rubs together frequent sex scenes with his libidinous teenage characters and a dark plot of butcher knives, severed heads and tortured animals.

Ellis’ descriptions of 1980s Los Angeles are glorious featuring confident kids in Wayfarers and Topsider deck shoes eating patty melts and smoking clove cigarettes while driving their parents’ Mercs and Jags to school. His music references are on point as ever, and a sensational soundtrack of Ultravox, The GoGo’s, Joe Jackson and The B52s accompanies scenes of pool parties, American football training, and long drives along LA’s boulevards.

As with Ellis’ first novel Less Than Zero, published when he was 21, the main character has sex with men and women. And himself. A lot. Bret in TheShards feels increasingly uncomfortable with his performative heterosexuality though. Openly dating one of ‘the hottest’, most popular girls in school, he secretly fantasises about men and has a great deal of clandestine sex with two male classmates. This self-erasure and duplicity add depth to the storytelling, not least because his stealthy behaviour creates confusion around some key crime incidents.

Having been accused of misogyny in the past, particularly after throwing shade at female filmmakers on Twitter or declaring himself a sexist who happens to like women, Ellis seems to be redressing a few outdated beliefs through his character of Mallory. Painting him as an unhinged villain with a phony smile and nasty locker-room banter, Ellis seems to be recalibrating his post-MeToo moral compass, and the casting-couch scenes with young boys reflect the Weinstein effect, as experienced by men. Nailing pop-culture references and teenage numbness and alienation as only he can, The Shards is a juicy, sinister, entertaining weapon of a book (nearly 600 pages long), with real darkness lurking behind the palm trees and sunshine.

The Shards is published by Swift Press on Tuesday 17 January.