Where to begin? Well firstly, I will just comment on the violence in this novel and say that it contains some of the most graphic torture and killings that I have ever read about both in the real and fictional world. There are wild and creative forms of brutality performed on people that I didn't know were possible. I am not easily put off by goriness, but a lot of pages of this book were difficult to read. It goes without saying that 'American Psycho' is not for the faint-hearted.

The story is told from the perspective of a wealthy investment banker named Patrick Bateman who lives on one of the most prestigious streets in New York City. The beginning of the novel suggests nothing too horrific about Bateman, but he does often mutter very questionable remarks about himself under his breath, begins seething over trivial matters, and is remarkably meticulous with assessing expensive clothes and jewelry. To the reader, he is initially just another self-absorbed upper-class asshole who lives a very extravagant, promiscuous and drug-fueled lifestyle. However, the dark and cruel side of Bateman's character eventually manifests and his acts of murder and sadism become a frequent hobby. It also becomes increasingly clearer that his sanity is very dubious, as he develops trouble with distinguishing the real from the imagined. His decaying sanity along with his astounding callousness creates a highly unreliable narrator and the novel eventually closes with a very ambiguous ending.

Easton Ellis is very skilled at writing characters. He pays close attention to characters' habits, intellect, temperament, level of empathy etc. and writes them in a way that makes them feel very real. I think why 'American Psycho' has stood the test of time is because of its portrayal of the upper-class in Manhattan, and the juxtapositions of common realities such as wealth & poverty, good & evil, attraction & repulsion.

This book shocked me. Though not for any of the reasons I might have expected.

Not shocking fact #1: This book is about a psychopath.
Yes, how very astute of me. I hadn't seen the movie before I picked American Psycho up, but most people who know a bit about books know a bit about Patrick Bateman. Despite this book not being very old, Bateman has a certain infamy amongst fictional serial killers and psychopaths. He is so wholly devoid of morality, completely disconnected from reality and human emotion, and obsessed with things, reeling off designer name after designer name, presenting what could be seen as Ellis' criticism of modern society and consumerism.



Not shocking fact #2: This book is extremely graphic and violent.
Well, it is a book about a serial killer; I didn't expect flowers and happiness. I should warn you if you're the kind of person who gets squeamish easily or are upset by graphically violent and disturbing scenes - this isn't the book for you. Bateman describes in a detached first person narrative each grisly atrocity he commits. He is 100% sociopathic, so unmoved by what he does and so immune to any plea for mercy.

"I imagine her naked, murdered, maggots burrowing, feasting on her stomach, tits blackened by cigarette burns, Libby eating this corpse out, then I clear my throat." (This is just the stuff I feel okay including without spoiler tags).

Not shocking fact #3: Patrick Bateman is a misogynistic piece of crap.
But I don't think that necessarily means the book or the author is. Or maybe yeah, Bret Easton Ellis could be a raging misogynist, but that's really not the point I took from the book. Bateman most definitely harbors no feelings or sympathy towards women, he deconstructs the women he meets, piece by piece, until they're reduced to just a sum of boobs, ass and vagina. His psychopathic nature is not limited to women, but his absolute and unending disdain for the female sex is apparent from the very beginning. Though, he's a psychopath so I'm not sure what some people were expecting.



The misogyny debate about this book greatly interests me. If there is one thing - probably above everything else - that I can't stand in books, it must be the positive depiction of sexism, slut-shaming and/or abusive relationships. But I've never thought that just showing the existence of something as part of a story equates to endorsing it. I suppose American Psycho might promote misogyny in the same way that any violent art might promote violence.

And I always remember a conversation I had with this guy way back in high school. We all had to read weekly news stories every Friday morning in our form rooms and one week there was this piece about "cheat dating" sites. As in, sites that encouraged married people to have affairs with others looking for affairs. I remember being pretty horrified and saying to this guy "I really don't think that should even be allowed, it just encourages people to cheat". And he shrugged and said "The way I see it, if you're the kind of person who's going to stumble across that site and think 'woah, what a great idea', there probably wasn't much hope for you anyway". And, you know, I think he was right.


The #1 most shocking fact about this book: It was soooo boring.
Yeah... I wasn't shocked by the violence, the psychopath, the graphic language, or the misogyny. But it never once occurred to me that a book which promised so much horror could have me wanting to skim read with boredom.

The fact is, I found being inside Bateman's emotionally-detached mind really repetitive and dull after a while. It was impossible to form any kind of emotional connection with him and, because of the first person narration, it was also impossible to form much of an emotional connection with anything or anyone else in the novel. Secondly, the really gritty stuff doesn't happen until the second half of the book; the first half is filled with Bateman's constant descriptions of designer clothes, his misogyny-filled rants with his almost equally repulsive friends, and his completely unerotic porn-fuelled masturbation sessions. By the time things got nasty, I was already losing interest.

Boredom - way more than the graphically violent and disturbing - is unforgivable to me.

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Hay quien sigue creyendo, no pocos, que las armas no incitan a la violencia, que son más bien las garantes de la libertad y la seguridad de las buenas gentes. De la misma forma, hay otros muchos que opinan que el capitalismo dejado a su propia inercia no es el responsable de tantos desmanes y que los controles y frenos a su desarrollo no hacen más que distorsionar su, de otro modo, perfecto y equilibrado funcionamiento. Ellis plantea aquí el retrato de esos “chiquillos” de los ochenta imbuidos de tales ideas que desprecian profundamente a quienes son incapaces de llevar su vida, culpables únicos de su situación, y que se creen con todos los derechos del mundo para apropiarse de la forma que sea de todo aquello que piensan merecer. Uno llega a sentirse culpable por seguir leyendo tanta bazofia yuppy, tanta violencia pornográfica, pero seguimos y seguimos, pensando que todo es una gran sátira o simplemente con la esperanza puesta en el justo castigo que Patrick Bateman debería recibir y así sentirnos mejor.

Disturbing Disgusting Violence


This is one of those books to read side by side with MindHunter, just to see how much reality surpasses fiction and vice-versa!

It’s crowded with all sorts of disgusting disturbing violence!

Goodness!... It’s a Psychopath’s mind!... What else could we expect?!...

When a book sticks with you, you know it is powerful. It may not be entertaining, and it may be downright disturbing, but if you can't get it out of your head it is most certainly great, and that is my experience with American Psycho.

For me, it's about the music.

Bret Easton Ellis did something miraculous within Patrick Bateman's killings: he destroyed the music of Huey Lewis and the News, Genesis and Whitney Houston. Before every nasty killing, Bateman goes on a diatribe about the music of one of these eighties' faves, then listens to the music while killing, making it the soundtrack of habitrails and bloodshed.

I can't listen to any of these singers without visions of Patrick Bateman's killings flooding into my consciousness. Granted, losing some of these singers is worse than the loss of others, but it has been over a decade since I last read American Psycho and the gory music video Ellis conjured in my mind is as strong as ever. I can barely reference the images of the real videos of "I Want a New Drug" or "If This Is It," but I can see a voracious rat about to eat a woman to death through her reproductive organs with stunning and disgusting clarity.

It is not a pretty book, and the squeamish should stay away, but for anyone who seeks to be overwhelmed by images they will never forget, American Psycho is one of the greatest books ever written.

*Beyond Ellis' power to evoke indelible images in my mind, horrific though they may be, there are depths in the story of Patrick Bateman that make it not just a great read but a nourishing read.

Is there another book that so perfectly captures the eighties in the US or the Reagan/Thatcher world view as American Psycho? Patrick Bateman is the quintessential eighties American male; he may even be America itself. Obsessed with appearance and appearances, consumption and greed (almost clinically so), Bateman is arrogant to the point of hubris, malicious, deviant, and ultra violent, yet he still maintains an outward likability that completely fools his friends (allies) much like the nation he so perfectly represents (from his first person narrative -- "me, me, me" -- right down to his designer suits and morning, skin revival rituals), and therein lies one of the necessities of violence in Ellis' narrative. If Bateman is America, Ellis needs to lay the nation's murderous streak bare; he needs to make people face the brutality and horror of the murderous act -- not simply gloss over it and move on as post-Vietnam America wittingly did and continues to do.

Even today, people blithely ignore the violence inherent in the American system, and if American Psycho is an allegory for this system, the terrible violence of Bateman's cruelest moments become the most important moments of the book. They force us to face the cruelty, to see the cruelty and not forget it. And if Ellis were to drop the violence but maintain the rest of the book as a criticism of consumerism, the removal of the violence would simply become another version what Reagan's America did so well (and the nation has been doing so well ever since) -- admitting the less offensive problems to hide the more offensive.

Even if we drop the allegory, however, and simply see Bateman as a monster whose presence criticizes hyper-misogyny, hyper-violence, hyper-masculinity, and hyper-consumption, Ellis' choice to express the violence as he did is sound because when Patrick Bateman isn't being violent (and he isn't being literally violent very often) his narrative has the ability to lull us into comfort -- to forget how horrible the man can be, how horrible he really is. Thus, the book's moments of shocking violence wake us out of our comfort zone and force us to face the sort of monster our culture created and still creates (there are more serial killers killing today, after all, than ever before).

When Ellis was writing this piece, I doubt that he was considering the infamy his book was about to achieve. So when I read American Psycho I try to suspend what I already know about the contents of the book and the controversy surrounding the book and imagine (which is the best I can do) what it would have been like for a reader who had no idea what they were getting into -- which was surely Ellis' intent (even if this could only happen a few times in the book's history): for the uninitiated, Bateman would seem a little weird to begin with, maybe mildly OCD, but likable all the same. Bateman's cynicism and his dislike of the insufferable people that surround him would likely win over most readers very quickly; we would connect with his unhappiness and quickly come to empathize with a man who's struggling to find out what is wrong with his life, even though he has a dream job, everything he'll ever need, and a potentially dream life. Then...BAM! He is a murderer. And not just a murderer but the worst kind of sadistic serial killer one can imagine. And we are instantly implicated in his violence (which I think is the ULTIMATE point of the book, regardless of other readings...that we are all implicated in creating the Bateman's of our world) because we empathized with the man, even liked the man, and we are in his head and watching him commit heinous acts, and we are compelled to continue reading. It challenges us to wonder if anyone can be part of this culture and truly claim innocence.

What an amazing reading experience it is must have been for the people who read the book without any foreknowledge. And what a tremendous feat of writing on Ellis' part. If you try to read American Psycho today, I hope you approach it from this direction because I think all of Ellis' possible purposes come clearer when we enter American Psycho as a blank slate -- even if it can only be an imaginary one.

I am not convinced that endless descriptions of murder and torture are a good metaphor for unrestrained eighties capitalism. Consequently, while I have read many books that made me uncomfortable or nauseous, I have not read any that did so for such weak returns.

The prose style is never better than competent. Generally it alternates between repellant and just very dull. I don't think it's hard to make readers feel sick and disgusted. If I tell you I have a puppy in one hand, and a blunt pencil in the other, even though you know they don't really exist you probably don't want me to decribe what happens when the two are made to interact. Exercises in this sort of writing have to work hard not to feel juvenile and this one doesn't work at all.

There is a lively ongoing debate over whether it's misogynistic or not, (just have a look at the comments to Paul Bryant's excellent review). To me it seems self-evident that the book is misogynistic – but then there are a lot of excellent novels that are also misogynistic, so I'm not sure how far that gets you. More pertinent for me was just the fact that I loathed every moment I spent reading it.

I think I threw it away halfway through. Maybe it turns into Tolstoy after page 200, but I have no inclination whatever to find out.

Truly fascinating. First of all, you have to be prepared to be let into the mind of a psychopath. That entails more than murder, which a lot of people reviewing this book completely miss -- what is psycopathy? The lack of empathy, which is judging people as objects rather than understanding they experience the concept of "I" exactly like you do, lack of remorse, and bold egotistical traits.

As you read this book, ponder "how much of American culture TELLS YOU to understand things the way Patrick Bateman does?" The answer is, all of it which exists to make money. People exist to consume product, (and to judge them by what they consume, by the way, for they're just another product that YOU consume. Don't pull the string any farther than that by the way, in case you find out your own idea of yourself is just as fake), and you are an outside entity, afloat and subject to this competitive world in which you need to WIN. (This book was written in 1991 and it's no mistake that Patrick Bateman idolizes Donald Trump.)
And look, it's not just a book writing about the shittiness of the world; if that were the case, anyone could write good books by just filling them with the worst parts of our culture. The point is, you can understand it and it's often, well ... funny. Or compelling. Or understandable. Or sad. It is after all based on a very real human condition, not just a satirical critique of the worst of human traits.

WATCH OUT for these two types of shallow reviews. "Its worth the boring stuff for the violence". or "It's misogynistic! And about murdering people. You like that?". I know it's not standard, but a protagonist CAN be a villain. If you think experiencing or creating something makes you an advocate of it, you're missing out on a lot of good art.

Anyways, the entire book is written from Patrick Bateman's point of view, and Patrick Bateman is a materialistic vain insecure obsessive compulsive hallucinating (yeah, mysogynistic) delusional psychopath. And you will be completely enveloped in his world. This is what traps you and makes the book so addicting. I would read this book at the park, or on the bus, and when I'd put it down to join the rest of the human world it was almost impossible. For a good 10 minutes I'd just be staring at people feeling a million miles away. Learn from this, but don't identify with it; this itself is a type of compassion to feel what a lot of people in this country are stuck in.

You don't skip over the bits about his facial creams, you absorb it and afterwards let your jaw drop that he is more passionate about it than any human life, or feeling. People ARE materials to him, just more useless and often tasteless ones.
Maybe you won't even notice when a talking cheerio is sitting in a chair being interviewed, since you can't be sure of what he's hallucinating either. (and that's key).

n  Screaming in a Dead Man's Earn

This was a book written by the young Ellis, the kid who was close to famous after 'Less than Zero'; or at least the diminished definition of 'famous' that applied to celebrities of the novelist kind and painters like Keith Haring and Basquiat. 'American Psycho' is as much a violent artistic gesture as it is a novel, an act of grand narrative destruction. As the machinery of story and language is hammered into twisted wreckage, and a new form emerges from the chaos, from the structural artifice before it... Ellis is suddenly and profoundly disgusted with the slick, polished, coke-dusted emptiness of Bull-market 80's living. All of it. All of them... the unanchored and swollen upper-middle-class he came from; waiting for someone to make them believers, or curse them. HIV came, and they just nodded, like it was an Old Testament judgement and not a retrovirus, like someone had it coming (but it sure as fuck wasn't them); and they were grateful for something to feel, a direction to worry at... groping and squinting at the darkness, seeking out vaguely apocalyptic shapes to justify the decadence, as if super-dense plutonium isotopes might add weight and mass to their empty hedonism.




American Psycho is Ellis screaming 'WAKE UP' in a dead man's ear. And you almost expect the milk-white eyes to open, because this book is LOUD. This is Ellis pointing an unloaded gun at people who don't believe they can die, pistol-whipping readers to show us we can bleed. He hates his peers for being living reflections of his own hollowed-out persona. He's just another walking corpse, going through the rituals of living, and slowly being liquefied by his own enzymes under a painted mask of youth and vitality and expensive cologne.



What makes it such powerful satire is the quieter comic absurdity hiding between the screaming and the Dahmeresque disassembling of the human form. The ridiculous power games and meaningless status symbols... the business cards, the restaurant reservations, the manicured physical perfection. A gold-plated culture; scratch the surface and you'll find the last generation's trash, compressed and deodorized and molded, then painted with gold. What passes for passion and creativity is Huey Lewis and Whitney Houston. Ponder that oblivion, and lament that the baby named WWIII was never born.




Eventually identity slips away, and 'friends' trade suits, apartments, women, faces, lives... because they're not sure what it is that makes them, 'them', and me, 'me'. In that context, serial killing is a desperate - and failed - existential gambit to reclaim the essence of Patrick Bateman Ellis.

**4.5"THE MOST FUCKED UP STORY EVVVVEEERRRRR" STARS**

n  n

Are you easily offended? Do not read this book.
Are you easily frightened? Do not read this review.
Are you easily annoyed? Do not read about this asshole .
Are you easily sickened? Do not read horrific tale.
Are you easily dizzied? Do not read anything.

Honestly, I have not idea why I enjoyed this materialistic, self centered, psychotic story, but GOD HELP ME, I DID. The only reason I decided to read the damn book is because I noticed it was #1 on numerous Goodreads list. When I first started reading, I was completely baffled as all the story entailed was Patricks self centered life, filled with his self absorbed unlikeable friends doing absolutely nothing worthwhile. What the hell is so impressive about that?? I imagined Christian Bale as Pat Bateman, which definitely helped make a day in the life of Pat enjoyable.... Here's a glimpse.....

Read Pat Shower:
(God I wish I could post this gif.If you are into nudity click the link http://i36.tinypic.com/2cy09hk.jpg )
n  n  
n

Read Pat Tan:


Read Pat Exercise :(My favorite part)



Read Pat mingle:


Red Pat fuck: (my second favorite)



...Yup that's a rundown of the first half of the book...Can you see why I was confused?.. I kept reading and slowly but surely Patrick starting dropping little clues. Here's a few......







.... Yeah, he could have been nicer but certainly didn't scream "SERIAL KILLER".................but this DID !





...Sadly animals were harmed in the story. I felt I should warn you..

...So, am I still wondering why this is #1...


American Psycho is by far the most gruesome, peculiar, cruel, Utterly Insane book I 've EVER read. This is not for the faint of heart. You must be ready for anything and everything to be written...Okay, I'm getting queasy just thinking about it .... ENJOY!

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A modern dark, very dark and controversial classic? Handsome, well educated, smart and extremely privileged Patrick Bateman works on Wall Street in the day.. and at night he does what he wants... whatever he wants.

A compelling meticulously planned piece of satire of the American Dream as seen and recanted by a first person... psychopath! What causes controversy is that the same detail and flat-tone Bateman uses to describe nights out and business, is used for his detailed very explicit and dark often sexually violenced themed murders, and it is the minute horrifying detail and the dispassion that it is documented that appears to have deeply offended some. especially as many of the victims are female and/or poor. Huge trigger warning for the detailed sexual violence.

A masterfully lesson in unreliable delusional first person storytelling. Can be seen as a deadly attack on the results and excesses of capitalism... as consumerism in our affluent lives being the gateway for psychosis, in that we deserve to take whatever we want? And the masterful cherry on top is that as the book plays out you have to question whether any of it is real!!!

2020 read and 2003 read

'Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence.'

Enter at your own risk, there's no Exit.

Let me introduce you to Maestro Bateman, your narcissistic, fancy-looking next-door neighbor with a psychotic nihilistic, obsessive-compulsive urge for sadistic rape and serial killing. We enter the depth of human depravity and manipulation. Ted Bundy's ghost enters: 'Murder becomes possession.'
The Bate is vain, snobbish, competitive and pretentious, he just wants to FIT IN! In his process of depersonalisation, he performs increasingly disturbing and brutal acts on his victims, a killing spree without any repercussions, so his murders become almost meaningless to him.

This convoluted, chilling, dark satire shows that the pursuance of money and power inevitably leads to greed, moral decay, and, finally, violence. Bateman is the symbol of those excesses of capitalism, while in his materialistic world, human feelings are obliterated by his serrogated knife.

We have 'brunch with a corpse', lethal hair mousse, we almost drown in body parts and fluids and chopped-up new decoration ideas like severed heads á la Dahmer enhance our living situation, we'll never dine alone again.

A highly recommended glimpse into the darkest pit of the human psyche and a mirror of reality and illusion, logic and disorder, narcissism and self-loathing.

Takes a while to get into but very enjoyable in the end.