I could not finish this book. In fact, when I finally (and gratefully) decided to stop reading it, I could not even bring myself to return it to my bookshelf. I actually threw it in the garbage, which I have never done to another book.

It's a shame, too, because up until about 3/4 of the way through, I LOVED this book. The writing is simply brilliant, and Ellis presents a fascinating and thought-provoking view of 1980's American society, made especially poignant by the fact that it is only mildly less disturbing than the view into the mind of a psycho-sociopath.

I thought I was doing really well getting through the elaborately grotesque and increasingly descriptive torture/murder scenes, understanding their placement and function within the bigger picture of the novel, as well as the contrast and compliment they brought to the other, more sane and mundane (but equally elaborate and descriptive) sections.

But really, Ellis. Enough is enough. I stopped reading when I found myself literally on the verge of vomiting, and I am still haunted and disturbed by concepts and imagery that have been burned into my brain forever. Thanks a lot, Bret.

4.5 Stars
This is easily one of the darkest, most messed up horror thriller novels that I have ever read… and I loved it. The story is ultra violent, particularly with excessive sexual violence, so I need to give huge content warnings. The main character is absolutely despicable, but it actually works in this case because it's done on purpose. I loved the social commentary on the corporate yuppie culture of the 1980s. This felt like the horror version of the Wolf on Wall Street. I completely understand if some readers will find this book disgusting, but I would highly recommend this one to readers willing to go down this dark path.

Wow.. hmm. Where to begin with this book? That surely was one of the most disturbing things i’ve ever read..

While this is a very hard book for some read mainly for it’s hardcore sexual and bloody content, i found it rather entertaining, sure every character here is so hateful and shallow their only thought was what/where to eat and with who to sleep. But i kind of got used to it and I enjoyed myself reading about the repetitive, wealthy and troubling life of Patrick Bateman. That’s why many people disliked reading this. It also had some pretty dark humor that kept the pace up. The cruelty at points was a bit much. It made me close the book a little and then continue.

Overall it has a great way of showing how the wealth and greed ruled and still rule America even to this day. With also a society that was/is full of sexism and racism.

4.5/5

An utterly chilling descent into madness. A controversial, but not entirely incorrect statement on class, workplace culture, toxic masculinity, and power dynamics.

⛧⛧⛧⛧⛧

*A re-read with

It took me three months to read American Psycho. Three months of having to read graphic sexual murders interspaced between either the tragedy of choosing and reserving restaurants, the intricacies of gentleman grooming, random discography reviews of 80s musicians, or rambling about some moronic videotape commitment. Felt like a bad Tuesday being described. It probably cultivated my imaginary apathetic organ, might have loosened my already lowly set morals. But it got me reading again, which is great. After a few months of not touching a book, instead writing senseless articles and working on marketing campaigns driven by the greed of capitalism, this feels like a pointless accomplishment. But I didn’t make money writing this, and that kind of irks me. Fuck.

What really happens? Is Patrick Bateman a psychopathic killer, or he does he have a deadly impression of himself that borders on and probably really includes insanity? Yes, this is a brutal and cruel novel about surface, surface, surface. Overindulgence of the rich and nameless (at least amongst each other), brand name suits, pocket handkerchiefs, glasses with prescription-less lenses and unnecessary tuxedos. Is the growing violent temperament of Patrick Bateman a real phenomenon or is he going over the edge with frustration, anxiety and lack of a genuine self? He gets away with everything (except maybe once) and lives on as a free maniac in an even more unhinged environment. The humor is dark, astringent and completely mordant, but for those of us who can bear it, it really tickles. This is a seriously comic look at a man who simply does not give a shit about anything. This may be the strongest book written by Bret Easton Ellis. Rock and roll, deal with it.

I enjoyed this collection of essays about important musical artists of the 80s, but was confused by some of the stuff in between.

i would have also done this if i had to live through the les mis craze of the late 80s

Have you ever watched the peels of your monstrous laughter marauding through a respectful silence like a gang of wild, cherry assed, baboons, barbarized by operant conditioning routines involving keg beer and reruns of Dawson’s Creek, and then thought; I’ve made a mistake? Yep. That was me in high school while observing the shrieking immurement of (un)Fortunato by one Mortar-Masseur Montresso, who, observing the victim’s considerable agitation, parrots back a demented simulacrum of his blood curdling screams, and so, to the tune of terrible troweling, rises a tit for tat chorus of caterwauling. I remember clearly having wrestled with the prelude to this paroxysm. Trying to syphon off the black humor welling up by thinking about Dr. Henry Cotton’s antiquated solution to mental illness (which involved pulling patient’s teeth), but no matter what I did, my internals kept taking on crude until the tiny skiff of self mastery capsized into the fathomless depths of animal amusement. It first touched the stillness of the room with a wheeze, doing little to upset the barometric-billiards in the surrounding space. Then there was a hoarse bark, a snap of the cue, its ballistics sufficient to disrupt the racked horror of my fellow students and send their attention scattering off surfaces and spiraling into the nimbus of my peculiar sensibilities. Soon I was expelling sonic hordes. Inebriated decimals, frequencies, waves, piling up trough/trough/peak/peak, advancing an auditory crusade against good taste. Crashing over objects, ricocheting off walls, tear-assing through circuitous canals to savage eardrums, trample ossicles, and kick cochlea for good measure. The teacher, a mask of incredulic-horrificationing, soon intervened on behalf of those pour souls caught in the vortex, demanding that I stop. But of course I couldn’t. And so I was sent to the office to atone for acts of heinous hilarity. Subsequently I was made to explain to my parents what was so damn funny about this ghastly revenge, to which I could only say: “You had to be there.”

I hope this preface might better contextualize why I found this book to be just okay as a grotesque satirical commentary on modernity’s callous, consumerist deformities - packaged in Pat’s obsessively exfoliated, highly symmetrical dermal bagging - but above average as a tool for coercing raucous outbursts that give the festooned saint presiding over your moral compunctions a bit of the dicky tummy by blasting the pious bastard in the beanbag with a pneumatic spudzooka loaded with Yukon Gold.

Now, I could make a pretty good case that those of you who don’t (didn’t) find it funny have missed something essential in the branding obsessed, body perfecting, sexually sadistic, jelly fish micro-waving, serial murdering, cannibal necrophiliac decapitationist, Patrick Bateman, and his continued fastidiousness in spite of medical issues brought on by acute business card envy.

But then you could well accuse me of being nuttier than squirrel turds and unworthy of serious consideration. And..

Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man...

I can’t, in good conscious, recommended this to anyone. Though I’ve provided something of a litmus test below to see if you are indeed the type who might derive a hearty chuckle from the content herein. Note that this sample is utterly anemic compared to the highly detailed gore which explodes across many pages like a bloated whale corpse packed with dynamite, compact discs, and yuppie intestines. I think it goes without saying that if you have a weak constitution you sh-

I have to return some video tapes.

“Some nights I would find myself roaming the beaches, digging up baby crabs and eating handfuls of sand – this was in the middle of the night when the sky was so clear I could see the entire solar system and the sand, lit by it, seemed almost lunar in scale. I even dragged a beached jellyfish back to the house and microwaved it early one morning, predawn, while Evelyn slept, and what I didn’t eat of it I fed to the chow.”

Patrick Bateman, it must be noted, had an unusual obsession with Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump is mentioned at least a dozen times throughout Bret Easton Ellis’s now-iconic 1991 novel “American Psycho”. I’m just throwing that fact out because it seems significant.

Indeed, Ellis’s novel—-controversial when it was first published—-still seems significant now, in 2023, for reasons that are not dissimilar to the reasons cited 33 years ago.

I did not read the book 33 years ago. I was graduating high school when the book came out. My summer of ’91 was occupied with packing for college and living with that nervous excitement that precedes a major life-change: freshman year of college. I didn’t have time to read it, even if I wanted to, which I didn’t. In fact, the book was never really on my radar.

Oh, I had heard about it, and when I arrived on campus and met new friends, many of whom were far more literate than myself, I overheard the conversations about how misogynistic and racist and homophobic the book was, and how vile Ellis must be. I would never read such a book, and anyone who did (and, God forbid, liked it) must be the worst kind of disgusting monster, the type who probably voted for George H.W. Bush and liked war and date rape and celebrated awful holidays like Columbus Day, which was nothing more than a celebration of imperialism and genocide. (This is how I talked in college. Not because I actually necessarily believed this shit, but mostly because I was trying to get cute college girls to play with my penis, and most of them talked like this, too.)

It would be three decades before I picked up “American Psycho” and actually read it. And, weirdly, liked it.

Nobody told me that it was hilarious. The fact that it is a very funny, very dark satirical comedy seemed to have been skipped over or ignored in the many conversations I had had about the book.

Also, I was old enough and mature enough as a reader to now distinguish the fact that the virulent misogyny/racism/homophobia evident in the book was not coming from Ellis but was, in fact, a symptom of the protagonist’s psychosis. Ellis did such a good job of getting in the head of a deplorable, soulless, homicidal monster that, I now recognize, many readers came away thinking that Ellis was the monster. People also often forget that Frankenstein was the name of the monster’s creator and not the monster itself.

Being more well-read than I was as a freshman in college, I saw the blatant allusions to Jane Austen, and how Ellis was painting a satirical picture of the vapid and shallow consumer culture of the “Me-First” rich white upper class. I saw in Patrick Bateman the parody of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street”, in which greed and self-interest is played up as a virtue in Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko. I understood where the obsession that Bateman had with serial killers like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy came from, as serial killers were kind of all the rage in the ‘90s.

I even saw the parallels between “American Psycho” and Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, in which Bateman—-clearly Ahab—-suffers from an obsessive-compulsive quest to find his own white whale: a conscience or any kind of emotion that would make him feel human in some way. New York City and Wall Street become, for Bateman, the rough seas that he must sail. His vicious and inhuman murders become a kind of religious rite he uses to summon something—-anything—-lurking beneath his superficial existence. I even understood the three chapters in which Bateman extolls the discographies of Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News: three of the most popular and, in many ways, vapidly commercial artists of the ‘80s. They are the epitome of shallowness, which describes Bateman to a ’t’.

And, of course, the constant references to Trump (which, since the book was written 20 years before Trump had any vocal designs of being President, is simply bizarrely prescient), a man who, even at that time, was a human imprimatur of everything sleazy and gauche regarding the wealthy, are voluminously apropos.

The book still shocks. For today’s post-Trump post-Covid audience, that’s definitely a good thing. If the book didn’t shock or disgust readers, that would be too horrible to contemplate.

I can understand why this book is much loved and much hated. It’s not a book that would engender mild feelings of indifference or “meh” in anyone who reads it. One either loves it or hates it.

I’m on the “love” side, and it’s because I understand what Ellis was trying to say. He was expressing a disgust and hatred for a warped sense of reality and dark side of humanity that he saw hiding in plain sight and that could only grow into something more dangerous—-and, in fact, did under Trump’s presidency. For this reason—-and all of the others previously cited—-“American Psycho” is, in my opinion, a vital American literary classic.

ever see that video Criminal, the one where a winsome and pathetic fiona apple is surrounded by empty beer bottles & video equiment as she writhes sadly in a closet, in the backseat of a car, and in a tub as some dude rubs his feet all over her face? ugh. this book is like that shitty, creepy video, except times 100. just thinking about parts of it makes me want to take a shower and rinse the muck off. Criminal had arty direction by an interesting director that i like, Mark Romanek. American Psycho is also interesting: intelligent and stylishly written, with some "points" to make about consumer culture, class, and male egotism. but i don't give a flying fuckeroo about interesting points or stylishness or intelligence when the vehicle you're using to express those points is one built on pure degradation and creepy self-indulgence. you may be making your points but you are also making me sick. congratulations!