Customer Reviews

American Psycho

Easton-Ellis' first person description of the development of a psychopath is nothing short of mind blowing and this fact alone makes American Psycho a great novel. Following the anti-hero Patrick Bateman through about a year of his life and aided by flashbacks to past events the reader is drawn ever more into the mindset of a killer and his normalisation and disassociation from the acts that he is committing. At the beginning of the book (where violence is only hinted at briefly), it is very easy to laugh at Bateman, his shallow life, appalling friends and fiancé and his assumption that happiness and wealth are one and the same thing. As the story develops one can almost feel pity for someone who is so clearly trapped in a life not of his choosing but which he is unwilling to leave for all the wrong reasons.

Bateman's increasingly violent behaviour and periods of psychosis characterise the middle of the book, but the author still finds room to add his own brand of dark humour to the situations he puts his star into. In the final section of the book we see Bateman develop into a full blown psychopathic monster, completely out of control and unable to repress the primal urges that are overcoming him.

That Easton-Ellis manages to achieve this whilst taking a sideways sneer at eighties yuppie culture AND providing an allegorical interpretation of what it means to be alive in modern day America is what makes this novel remarkable and ultimately an essential read.

My only complaint is that the novel is too long. Did the Huey Lewis and The News chapter really add anything to the plot, particularly after lengthy discussions on Genesis and Whitney Houston? Some of the later murders also seemed to add very little to the development of the character or the plot and one could argue were only added for pure shock value. (I'm thinking in particular of the murder of the escort girls and the rat chapter). This has the effect of making the last fifty to a hundred pages a bit of a chore, and dilutes the otherwise excellent ending.

Like Lunar Park this novel creeps up on you and doesn't necessarily leave you in a better place than when you started it. There is no happy ending and if you feel disgusted after 200 pages it is probably best to put the book down at this stage rather than put yourself through the last 150 pages which are far more graphic. If you found the humour in the film entertaining and didn't find the murders too gory then I would recommend this. If you have trouble dealing with misogyny or black comedy then it is probably best to do what most of New York's high society should have done and avoid Bateman altogether.

On the one hand this book is, and let me make this clear straight away, one of the most repulsive books I have ever read. The further you get throught the book, the more horrific the murders become. It would be very easy to dismiss this as an empty, attention-grabbing ploy.
But that would be unfair: this book works brilliantly as a satire on the 1980s attitudes. Pages are filled with excrutiating detail of what Bateman is wearing; his daily routine is scrutinised in minute detail; his friends are empty-headed, vacuous fools, who listen to nothing. Bateman himself is simply taking the consumerist dream to its extremes: the idea that he can take life. Filled with black humour, and some truly surreal situations (Bateman asks for a "decapitated" coffee; no-one appears to notice), this is fantastic. The sex and violence are unpleasant, but in the context of the novel they make sense.

This book, I loved. Its pure satire straight from the intellectually messed up mind of Bateman, a pathological time bomb exploding in the book to help Ellis show the world the downside of yuppie America. The events range from comparing business cards to violence at the most extreme level.
Ellis uses Bateman very well in the book. His self analytical diagonstic style at times shock the reader. Late in the book, the story moves from 1st person to 3rd person for a couple of pages, exhibiting an unexpeted style of sleek beutiful prose found no where else in the psychoanalytical frame of Bateman.
The characters all show flaws of upper class yuppie society. Evelyne obsessed with marriage and wealth, Courtney constantly on anti-depressents, making her a character the complete opposite of Bateman.
The humour is not in the violence, but in the explicit manner in which Bateman tells people numerously he is psychotic and wants to kill them and they are obvlivious to it.
To experience a completley different novel, read this. An explosive satire on American capitalist corruption featuring a genuine psychotic murderer will have your heart racing.

I read this book before I read any reviews. I saw it on the shelf in Waterstones, opened it up and began reading from the restaurant scene, where our hero is drawing someone's intestines and says to his girlfriend that it's a 'watermelon'. So I bought it. It was incredibly long, tedious at times and was a real grind to read - but I suspected it would get better and it did. That is, if gory description is your thing. It is mine, only because I've never come across an author who has written it so beautifully. There was none of the 'PC' subtlety that exists in so many books, and I think that worked well for this novel. When I talked about aspects of it with a friend she said that the reason there are so many dull and repetitive scenes is because Ellis is trying to wear us down; my mind literally began to throb about half way through the book, and I think that is how the main character is feeling too - Numb, bored, out of touch, frustrated. If you consider the descriptions in the book and how you are feeling while reading it, you get a pretty accurate idea of what Ellis is trying to convey. I think a lot of people have missed this because they expect a book to be exciting, to have their hearts racing all the time -- which is a fair expectation. But that's why American Psycho is so clever; It's heavy handed, and so is the world. It's raw and obscene, and so is the world. But most people say 'That's life' to the world and rant and rave about a book.
I don't agree with those who say it is childish or adolescent. Far from it. I think there is a psuedo etiquette flying around, which says anything that describes gore is automatically tasteless, when that isn't the case. If the context is considered as well as the very much apparent point of the novel, then the gore fits very neatly in to place. I was totally repulsed by it, and I'm glad - because it means I'm reading a book powerful enough to have a physical effect. Not a lot of writers can do that.

This is a pure classic. It won't age well, because of all the dated references, but that is part of the allure. Ellis has intentionally created a masterpiece that will not last the test of time. Probably one of the funniest books you'll ever read. The reviewer who said it was boring couldn't be farher from the truth. The book is essentially a meditation on the human condition with the hillariously cruel, vain, and honest character of Patrick Bateman as our guide.

With a life is so blandly cosseted and every material object already in his possession, Patrick Bateman is compelled to bring meaning to his vacuous existence through contrast. Unfortunately for humanity, he does this through torture, mutilation and murder. He only comes alive when he is snuffing out life. Nice suits though.
A clever, often hilarious swipe at Reagon’s America and a journey into a world of upper class clones we’re both fascinated and repelled by. Perhaps those who criticised on the grounds of misogyny, racism or gratuitous violence are the kind of people who write letters of complaint to the Daily Mail about the amount of swearing on tv, but remain unconcerned by the injustice cruelty and hypocrisy of daily politics.
Don’t listen to the critics. Buy the book.

If you have seen the film it is so important that you read this book, because, as always, the stupid director forgets to include the seemingly insignificant but vital points. It is an hilarious book, depending on how you view it I suppose, that some find slow at first until the blood starts to flow about half way through.
The arrogance and meticulous detail that Patrick’s narrative describes everything in is superb and gives the author a brilliant tool to mould the environment around this single character. As a result you enter the brain of a psychopath without realising it at all, with the obvious exception of being witness to the odd torture and murder scenes.
I’m glad I saw the film first because I loved it, and if I had read the book first I would have hated it unfortunately.

nasty, so nasty and sick beyond belief. A thick dense structured novel of style obessed wall st yuppie patrick bateman (brother of sean from rules of attraction). This book reeks with pages of style junk, labels, whitney houston and huey lewis and the news.Tedious and yawnsome till it gets to page 150ish, then the real horror unfolds, and its relentless. Pages of the most detailed graphic sex scenes (at times a real turn on)then it decends into the most gruesome and sickiest degrading horror every committed to page(check out girl and the rat). Distrubing and utterly enthralling, a voyerestic view into the mind of pyschopath pat bateman. The book is very thought provoking and a superb satire on the greed is good motto of the 80's, and the sense that this guy gets away with it as everyone round the "hero" doesnt even notice his deranged madness. An unstoppable juggernaut that leaves a sour taste in your mouth. If you've never read it, then read it once, as its a must. A contempoary classic. Books are not written as good as this anymore. I urge you to buy it, you wont be disappointed

Perhaps the most notorious book of the early 1990s, American Psycho continues Bret Easton Ellis' savage dissection of eighties American society, begun in his earlier novels, 'Less than Zero' and 'The Rules of Attraction'. Although infamous, on account of the much publicised violence and torture, American Psycho does not really deserve its 'sick' reputation. The violence is there, and in places it is very extreme, but really it is no more than a distraction to the real story of what society, or rather wealthy society, has become. The characters within the book are generally shallow, vain, arrogant, thoughtless, bored and generally unlovable; ordinarily reasons enough to distance the reader from any work of fiction, but the author has a knack for turning the most mundane details into a grotesquely fascinating series of snapshots. Chapters containing the reviled scenes of violence are book ended with chapters describing Patrick Bateman's choice of toiletries and his opinions on Huey Lewis and the News. Bret Easton Ellis can be accused of using too much dialogue, of revelling in brand names, of writing essentially plotless books, but the simple fact is, he does it very, very well. It is true to say that American Psycho captures the spirit of the greed obsessed eighties. Depending on how much money you had at the time, this book will either remind you of all the things you loved or despised about that decade. And the moral of the story? Patrick Bateman never did get caught. Just like real life really.

Well, what can I say about this book? I wouldn't say I was that disturbed by it, in the end, in part because I found the writing quite impenetrable and hard going so that I couldn't really get into the narrative.

It's a clever book; there's no doubt about that. You have to read it really carefully to get it, I think. Does Patrick Bateman commit any of the crimes he describes or does he just fantasise about it? They're pretty horrific scenes so either way, he fits the book's title. There are certainly enough inconsistencies to make you wonder, and I do find that clever. In fact, I find it a clever book all round but I just struggled so much with the delivery.

In essence, I couldn't say I'd truly recommend this book because I didn't find it very readable and, yet, at the same time I can't help thinking it is a modern classic because it did something with the unreliable narrator that hadn't really been done before. Even the major things that I object to in the book, like the constant detailed descriptions of clothes and food that slow everything down, I understand their necessity. Not a book I enjoyed but one that I respect.