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Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs. Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety--only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father's, his stepdaughter's doll violently "malfunctions," and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events--a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son's age--Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania. Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution--about love and loss, fathers and sons--in what is surely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career.</div> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> A Tale of Two Brets: An Amazon.com Interview with Bret Easton Ellis <img src="http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/authors/easton-ellis_brett.m.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> In his novel Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis takes first-person narrative to an extreme, inserting himself (and a host of real characters from the publishing world) into the haunting story of a drugged-out famous writer living in the suburbs trying to reconnect with his wife and son and reconcile his damaged past. Ellis is at the top of his game in Lunar Park, his first novel since 1999's Glamorama, delivering a disturbing and delirious novel about celebrity, writers, and fathers and sons (not to mention a cameo from notorious Ellis creation, Patrick Bateman). Amazon.com senior editor Brad Thomas Parsons spoke with Ellis in a Seattle to Los Angeles phone call to talk about the fact and fiction behind Lunar Park, New York versus LA, '80s music, and the whole "American Psycho thing." Read the Amazon.com interview with Bret Easton Ellis </div> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> Less Than Zero (1985) <img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679781498.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> Published when Ellis was a junior at Bennington, Less Than Zero is the mesmerizing first-person chronicle of Clay, our laconic, zoned-out guide to a subculture of over-privileged nihilism in early '80s Los Angeles. He travels back home from Camden College (a thinly veiled Bennington) for Christmas break and re-enters his circle of jaded friends--including his ex-girlfriend Blair, and his best friend Julian, who's now hustling to support his drug habit--and a parade of Porches, late-night parties, cocaine, and casual destruction. Ellis on Ellis: "I don't think it's a perfect book by any means, but it's valid. I get where it comes from. I get what it is. There's a lot of it that I wish was slightly more elegantly written. Overall, I was pretty shocked. It was pretty good writing for someone who was 19." </div> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> The Rules of Attraction (1987) <img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/067978148X.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> A line-up of Camden College students share the narrating duties in The Rules of Attraction, Ellis' sex-fueled, drug-baked second novel. There's Lauren (who's in the midst of losing her virginity as the book opens), who longs for her boyfriend Victor, currently traveling through Europe; Lauren's ex, Paul, a bisexual party boy who hooks up with hard-drinking closet-case Sean (surname Bateman--that's right, younger brother of Patrick), who also has the hots for Lauren. Less than Zero's Clay makes a cameo appearance as well as a passing glimpse of Ellis' Bennington classmate Donna Tartt's murderous Classics majors from The Secret History. Ellis on Ellis: "It might be my favorite book of mine. I was writing that book while I was at college. Sort of like the best of times, the worst of times. There was a lot of elation, there was a lot of despair. It was just a really fun book to write. I loved mimicking all the different voices. The stream of conscious does get a little out of hand. I kind of like that about the book. It's kind of all over the place. It's casual. It's scruffy. That's the one book of mine that I have a very, very soft spot for." </div> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> American Psycho (1991) <img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679735771.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> Shopaholic sociopath Patrick Bateman's killer grip drags readers into a bloody, brand-name, urban nightmare as the 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie executes his grooming habits and eviscerates strangers with equal élan. Simon & Schuster dropped the too-hot-to-handle American Psycho which was then published as a paperback original by Vintage Books. Ellis received death threats while the book was boycotted, sliced up by reviewers, and went on to become a bestseller. Mary Harron's 2000 film version starred then little-known British actor Christian Bale, who would later suit up as the Dark Knight in 2005's Batman Begins. Ellis on Ellis: "It was good. It was fun. It was not nearly as pretentious as I remember I wanted it to be when I was writing it. I found it really fast-moving. I found it really funny. And I liked it a lot. The violence was... it made my toes curl. I really freaked out. I couldn't believe how violent it was. It was truly upsetting. I had to steel myself to re-read those passages." </div> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> The Informers (1994) <img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679743243.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> Ellis returns to early '80s Los Angeles ennui with The Informers, a loosely connected collection of stories of the bored, rich, and morally depraved, written around the same time as Less than Zero. Sex, drugs, and gratuitous violence take center stage, with characters including an aging, predatory anchorwoman, a debauched rock star tearing through Japan, and a pick-up artist vampire. While some of the vignettes echo better Ellis works, ultimately the stories don't add to much as a whole. Book critics are less than receptive to Ellis' post-American Psycho offering. Ellis on Ellis: "Those were written while I was at Bennington. I wrote a lot of short stories between 1981 or 1982 or so... The Informers more or less kind of represented probably the best of those stories. I wrote a lot of really bad ones, but those are the ones that worked the best together." </div> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> Glamorama (1999) <img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0375703845.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" align="left"> Actor-model Victor Ward (who first made an appearance in the Ellis oeuvre in The Rules of Attraction) is the narrator of Glamorama, Ellis longest novel yet. Ellis offers bold-faced names and celebrity skewering in the first half of the book as Victor tries to open a Manhattan club while cheating on his supermodel girlfriend and double-crossing his partner, but the second half takes a violent, paranoid turn as Victor is sent to England and unwittingly lured into a sadistic ring of international terrorists (posing as supermodels) leaving a bloody trail across the globe. Ellis on Ellis: "[T]he book wasn't necessarily about terrorism to me. It was about a whole bunch of other stuff. It's definitely the book that I can tell--I don't know if other people can tell but I can tell as a writer--is probably the most divisive that I've written. It has an equal number of detractors as it does fans. It doesn't really hold true with the other books. It was the one that took the longest to write, and the one that seemed the most important at the time. It's an unwieldy book... I like it." </div> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> Ellis on DVD <table width=100% cellpadding=4> <tr align=center> <td width="33%"> <img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00005V9IH.01.TZZZZZZZ.jpg" border=0> Less Than Zero </td> <td width="33%"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0009A40ES.01.TZZZZZZZ.jpg" border=0> American Psycho </td> <td width="33%"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00007L4KI.01.TZZZZZZZ.jpg" border=0> The Rules of Attraction </td> </tr> </table> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket"> Will the Real Bret Easton Ellis Please Stand Up? Visit the author's Web site at www.2brets.com. </div>

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Lunar Park

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1 3 false false Sat Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2005 Thu Jan 24 10:09:54 -0800 2008 Thu Jan 24 10:27:14 -0800 2008 more...]]> 1 2 false false Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sat Aug 16 10:02:39 -0700 2008 Sat Aug 16 10:05:22 -0700 2008 Less Than Zero off of my favorite books list. Could this book have been worse? I don't know. I really am not sure how. If we refer back to my list of things Douglas Coupland did to screw up JPod, BEE here does them all and then some, by adding in less pornog...more...]]> 3 2 false false Tue Oct 09 12:53:59 -0700 2007 Tue Oct 09 13:00:18 -0700 2007 that impressed. It was just a little too over the top. Admittedly, this over the top aspect made it really amusing; the plot is basically that Bret Easton Ells (by writing himself in as the protagonist, he 'does an impression of himself') i...more...]]> 5 5 false false Tue May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Tue May 29 09:10:40 -0700 2007 Tue May 29 09:11:16 -0700 2007 "How lonely people make life. But also I realized what I hadn't learned from him: that a family - if you allow it - gives you joy, which in turn gives you hope."

I’m a pretty big BEE fan, and I love his cool, detached writing style, and how all his books are slightly deranged....more...]]> 3 1 false false Sun Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2006 Tue Aug 21 22:25:15 -0700 2007 Tue Aug 21 22:25:15 -0700 2007
I read a short remembrance of Tom Cruise in the late 80's by Bret a ...more...]]> 2 1 false false Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Mon Jun 18 23:25:25 -0700 2007 Thu Jul 05 01:10:03 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 2 false false Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sat May 26 11:56:51 -0700 2007 Thu Mar 20 12:41:54 -0700 2008
Es bueno leer Lunar Park sin saber nada d...more...]]> 4 1 false false Sun Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2006 Fri May 25 12:45:17 -0700 2007 Fri May 25 13:46:05 -0700 2007 more...]]> 1 1 false false Fri Nov 07 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Tue Nov 18 19:13:08 -0800 2008 Tue Nov 18 19:13:51 -0800 2008 1 more...]]> 4 0 false false Sat Oct 03 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Sep 30 17:01:13 -0700 2009 Sat Oct 03 06:47:49 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Tue Jan 13 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Thu Jan 08 19:54:43 -0800 2009 Tue Jan 13 15:37:20 -0800 2009 more...]]> 0 0 false false Thu Feb 05 09:35:45 -0800 2009 Thu Feb 05 09:35:45 -0800 2009 Easton's device of inserting himself into the novel compares unfavorably with Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound, while Peter Straub and Stephen King used a similar gimmick more effectively than Ellis does. Some readers enjoyed Lunar Park as a straightforward horror story, but most felt that it was tri...

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Something tells me I might have been able to appreciate the satire of Lunar Park if I'd read Ellis' other novels first. As it is, Lunar Park was my introduction to Ellis, and therefore all references to his life, previous novels, and whatever else felt lost on me.

A...more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Apr 27 18:45:07 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 27 19:14:23 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu Dec 04 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sun Nov 30 20:18:12 -0800 2008 Thu Dec 04 12:01:22 -0800 2008
...more...]]> 4 1 false false Fri May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun May 17 21:46:13 -0700 2009 Sun May 17 21:49:59 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Jun 08 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Jun 10 13:13:02 -0700 2009 Wed Jun 10 13:18:10 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Sep 27 06:36:25 -0700 2008 Tue Sep 23 08:54:13 -0700 2008 Sat Sep 27 06:36:25 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 0 false false Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Aug 25 08:04:12 -0700 2008 Mon Aug 25 08:08:49 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Tue Aug 12 14:17:06 -0700 2008 Tue Aug 12 19:19:36 -0700 2008 Less Than Zero (1985), marked him as a rising literary prodigy at age 19. His writing explored themes of the self-absorption and hedonism of the American 80's, and in a way, highlighted the emptiness and despair experienced by the so...more...]]>