American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis, 1991
Horror Mystery, thriller & crimeContemporary fictionLiterary fiction
A Wall Street banker's immaculate surfaces—suits, reservations, CD cases—crack into a satire of appetite, status and violence. The prose stays cool and precise while the mood slides from satirical status anxiety into dread and melancholy.
Feels like unease, dread and melancholy.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy cold satire of money and status and can handle a narrator who is deliberately hollow. Be aware that the violence is graphic and often sexual, and the repetitive brand-name detail can make long stretches feel numbing.
Why read it
It shows how polished surfaces can hide appetite and cruelty, and its satirical chill still sharpens questions about status, consumption and violence.
A page from the book
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. Bret Easton Ellis.Dropped by Simon & Schuster after protests, American Psycho was published by Vintage in 1991, when Ellis was twenty-seven.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is American Psycho for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy cold satire of money and status and can handle a narrator who is deliberately hollow. Be aware that the violence is graphic and often sexual, and the repetitive brand-name detail can make long stretches feel numbing.
- What is American Psycho like?
- The prose stays cool and precise while the mood slides from satirical status anxiety into dread and melancholy. Feels like unease, dread and melancholy.
- What should I read after American Psycho?
- If you liked American Psycho, try The Tenant (Freida McFadden), Bunny (Mona Awad) and The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins).
A taste of the feed
The private prayer of anyone who has ever watched a perfect clique from outside.
I quietly prayed for the hug implosion all year last year. That their ardent squeezing might cause the flesh to ooze from the sleeves, neckholes, and A‑line hems of their cupcake dresses like so much inane frosting. That they would get tangled in each other’s Game of Thrones hair, choked by the ornate braids they were forever braiding into each other’s heart‑shaped lit‑ tle heads. That they would choke on each other’s blandly grassy perfume. Never happened. Not once.
Bunny · Mona Awad
A home you can't stop looking at, even though it hurts.
I lived at number twenty-three Blenheim Road for five years, blissfully happy and utterly wretched. I can’t look at it now. That was my first home. Not my parents’ place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can’t bear to look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don’t want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can’t help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me.
The Girl on the Train · Paula Hawkins
The logic of a person who thinks protection and possession are the same thing.
But not everything was meant to be free. Some things had to be kept in cages.
You Shouldn't Have Come Here · Jeneva Rose
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed