Lunar Park

Finished my re-read of this. I'm still going to call this my favorite BEE book, with Glamorama as a close second.

4,5⭐

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything

The author as central character in a book of fiction is becoming more the reality these days, and Lunar Park by Ellis takes this transgressive sub genre to another level. The reality part starts by Ellis recounting his evolution as a writer: his early success at 21 while still in college with his debut novel Less than Zero, the celebrity life in the Brat Pack of the literary elite in New York fuelled by powerful drugs and lots of sex with males and females alike, the controversial publication of his third novel, American Psycho, that took him to new heights of fame and controversy but also to the lower depths of the drug culture and to the blunting of his creative genius. Reality then gives way to a fictitious memoir in which Ellis is in a battle to save his family from a serial killer who is out to get him and his family. Lunar Park is thus focused the rebirth of the literary brainiac, Ellis, and is a blend of fact and fiction, dwelling on the unabashed revelations of self destruction wrought by one to whom much was given.

In this novel, Ellis is married to a celebrity movie star wife (the fiction), with two kids (one his own and the other his wife’s from another man). He is trying desperately to be the good dad that his own father was not. And yet his bid to stay clean of drugs unravels and strange happenings start occurring around his family: a man who resembles Patrick Bateman of American Psycho starts re-appearing, the car his dead father drove keeps popping up in the most unexpected places, teenagers from the area are disappearing, and a serial killer is killing people off in a copy-cat style to what was written in the first draft of American Psycho, a version known only to Ellis. It’s like the publisher said, “Bring it on, man – let’s have a real cross-genre novel here – let’s have a dysfunctional family story with a shot of horror, a touch of the supernatural, a boat load of drugs, a hint of murder, and let’s give the reader an experience akin to bopping in and out of a hallucinatory drug trip.”

Plot notwithstanding, and the plot harkens to a Stephen King novel, the larger commentary of the book is on the neuroses of the rich and famous, where kids are in therapy by the age of six, where they are fed uppers and downers ad nauseam, and the mark of their generation is a perennial tremor in the hands. The adults are no better, guzzling drugs by the bucket load. Ellis cranks up the pace from a rather languorous start with a lot of back story (on himself) to a thriller laced with short sentences, dreams punctuated with reality, horror mixed with humour, until we are confronted with the real bad guys, all of whom live in Ellis’ head and in his past.

I found the weaving of fact and fiction into the novel interesting and was left with the question of how much of oneself does a novelist have to inject into his work before he himself becomes a parody? The other question I had was how much drugs and alcohol did Ellis actually imbibe in order to be still coherent enough to write this well-plotted story? Or did he, being a celebrity writer, have an army of script doctors and nurses around to help him? Interesting musings to be left behind after reading this book...

Buying this book immediately upon seeing it was worth it for the first chapter alone, in which Ellis writes an abbreviated hysterical parodic autobiography, half-true, half obvious fiction, half who knows? He details the inspiration and reception each of his books had, so obviously the reader will be rewarded for having been familiar with those. The story goes on to paint him as taking a lot of anxiety medication to ease his discomfort and insecurity as a husband/father, and ultimately takes a turn toward horror with him believing the house to be haunted and his daughter's Tomogacci to be alive and murderous. His wife in the novel is an actress he made up and had a website created for, and he also includes fellow writer Jay McInerney as his friend who shows up at a party. Um... I just wish BEE would write more often. What a prick.

This is amazing and weird

Ein für BEE Verhältnisse ziemlich bekömmliches Stück Literatur. Ungemein spannend, sehr originell und krass gut geschrieben; und endlich mal ein BEE unter 700 Seiten, paar Nebenwerke ausgenommen. Ich glaube das ist mein BEE Favorit bislang (2025).

Ellis is the king of unreliable narrators.

There's a dog in a BEE story. Spoilers ahead.

So, I almost stopped because there's a dog and I know from the beginning that things will not end well for this dog. My feelings of dread increased every time the dog survived an encounter with the "thing". By the time I neared the end I just couldn't deal. I skipped over the dog's part even though it was during the climax of the book. I had to. My sympathy for the main character was already stretched thin from the way he treated Victor the dog.

But the rest of the book was awesome. Bret Easton Ellis does horror. And a fictional memoir. And a psychological thriller. And satire.

With a Furby.