American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis, 1991
A Wall Street banker's immaculate surfaces—suits, reservations, CD cases—crack into a satire of appetite, status and violence.
Bret Easton Ellis
Dropped by Simon & Schuster after protests, American Psycho was published by Vintage in 1991, when Ellis was twenty-seven.
Feels like unease, dread and melancholy.
The boredom that follows when even love and war stop registering.
Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn’t bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn’t a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being - flesh, blood, skin, hair - but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn’t figure out why - I couldn’t put my finger on it. Books by Bret Easton Ellis
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