This was way too creepy for my tastes, my friend wanted to read this book together otherwise I would have DNFed. This is just a really weird book with one of the most scarring scenes I ever read in a book, and I was really frustrated with the rich people problems tone. Overall I don't like horror, so I probably never should have picked it up in the first place!

That was...odd...very odd

In diesem Roman jongliert BEE wieder gekonnt mit biografischen Fakten und Fiktion. Und obwohl man seinen Stil hier erkennt, ist dieses Buch anders als seine restlichen Werke. Hier hat man eine Mischung aus BEE und Stephen King. (Wobei King für mich der Meister des Horrors ist.) Ich denke jedoch, dass Horrorelemente in diesem Buch eher einem anderen Zweck dienten: Nicht den Leser zu erschrecken, sondern eigene Vergangenheit mit ihren Dämonen in Bildern zu fangen. Für BEE (realen und seinen Alter-Ego in diesem Buch) war dieser "Dämon" sein Vater.
  
 Der Roman dreht sich auch um Vater-Sohn-Beziehung und um Vergangenheit,  Gegenwart und die Zukunft. Diese Familienthematik steht im Mittelpunkt, denn der Protagonist, der 40-jährige Schriftsteller Bret, versucht sein Familienleben zu retten und die Beziehung zu seinem (ungewollten) Sohn aufzubauen. Das ist für den Autor ungewöhnlich, denn bis jetzt hat er sich etwas anderer Thematik bedient. Nichtsdestotrotz bekommt man hier Sarkasmus, den man schon von anderen Büchern kennt. So nimmt BEE seine Werke und derer Kritiken unter die Lupe, somit auch die Leserschaft und die Auswirkungen des Erolgs auf den Schriftsteller. Satirisch besprochen werden auch Vorstadtsleben und Essenstreffen der reichen Schnörkel, Schule und Erziehung, Paartherapie und Psychotherapie.

Außerdem bekommt man hier gewohnte Paranoia, Drogen- und Alkoholexszesse, Verfolgungswahn, Depersonalisierung; aber auch Spukhaus, Geisterjäger, angreifende Kuscheltiere und einen Serienmörder, der sich für Patrick Batemann hält.

Dieses Buch bezieht sich stark auf "American psycho", deshalb sollte man den skandalösesten Roman zuerst gelesen haben.
Ja, wenn man den Autor mag, soll man "Lunar Park" auf jeden Fall lesen. Vielleicht gefällt es nicht jedem, weil es so anders ist. Wenn man jedoch mehr als Horrorszenen und Gewalt sehen möchte, kommt man auf seine Kosten, denn unter dem ganzen Schnichschnack versteckt sich mehr, als man auf den ersten Blick erkennen würde.

Ich habe den Roman genossen, und nachdem ich die letzte Seite zugeschlagen habe, hätte ich ihn am liebsten von Neuem angefangen zu lesen.

So I've spent this year developing a love/hate relationship with Bret Easton Ellis' work. I don't understand why his books fascinate me or even why they work as compelling fiction, yet I keep reading them because his voice is so distinct. Disturbing, empty, and shallow most of the time, but distinct. Then along comes Lunar Park. I spent 90% of the book hating it, wondering why I was still reading it, and then found the ending beautiful. No. Really. I didn't think Ellis could write something that would fit under my (admittedly very personal) definition of "beautiful" anything. Knowing he wrote this before Imperial Bedrooms (see my two word review for my opinion on that one) renders it even more puzzling. Oh whatever. Obviously I can't articulate the feelings finishing this book has aroused. I liked it. I don't know why.

Después de leer Los Destrozos no esperaba otro tan bueno.

Another amazing Bret Easton Ellis book. As sad and scary as a closed down cinema.

There’s a story behind the film Adaptation: scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman had a hard time adapting The Orchid Thief, so what did he do? He wrote a film about him having a hard time adapting The Orchid Thief, writing himself into the script, creating for himself a twin brother, dedicating the finished piece to the sibling who didn’t exist. Author Bret Easton Ellis, creator of American Psycho and other “transgressive” novels, wrote himself into his novel Lunar Park, conjuring for himself a family, a film actress wife, a quiet neighborhood in the suburbs, a son. A series of brutal murders, a haunting, a loss. I write stories but I could never imagine writing myself into one of them, even as an exercise. Of course every writer writes himself into his stories, his fears, his joys, but how terrifying to see your own name on a page, to see yourself as a fictional character running away from fictional horrors. Honesty can be very frightening, so with Lunar Park Ellis was being very brave. Ian McEwan asks, How can a novelist find atonement when, in his novels, he is God? But Ellis found atonement. There was one long passage in the novel that ends with From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams. Writing these words, would it be too much to say that Ellis found freedom? Perhaps, upon finishing the novel, he had forgiven everyone and everything that had to be forgiven, and in the process also found absolution.

I think this is a remarkable book.

NO book has ever (EVER ) pulled such powerful emotion out of me. ( I won't say 'which' emotion...it's a surprise.)

Bret Easton Ellis is a good writer, something I feel is obvious from this book. Had he not been, I would never have finished it. Ellis seems to have several ideas for this book. The false autobiographical story, the meta perspective, the Stephen King-homage, the father and son theme, the satirical look at the direction that modern society. I don't mind any of these, and some of these ought to be rigt up my alley. But to me, the book just didn't work.

It starts of in a really interesting way, and I was curiously tagging along with it, looking forward to where it would take me. But as the story (slowly) progresses, my interest starts to fade. Perhaps it was because he didn't manage to combine all the elements in a satisfying (to me) way? The father/son theme is perhaps the most interesting part of the book, and you could easily remove it and have the story work about just as well (maybe then only as a horror/satire). Looked at in isolation, the horror elements could have been form a Goosebumps novel, and somehow I feel Ellis could have solved it all in a more clever way. The description of the parties and the lavish lifestyle was most likely satirical, but maybe I just don't know enough about Ellis to get any joy out of them.

Towards the end of the book, it almost feels like Ellis is as bored with the story as the reader is, just checking off the last pieces on the check list before he can call it quits. Going all meta, sentimental, tying up plot elements in a bow, leaving a little bit of mystery and then paint a nice picture. Though I did actually enjoy the last couple of pages of the book. But it was despite the rest of it, not because of it.

I might be a bit harsh here. I did not like the book, but Ellis is talented, and this book probably deserves the love it gets. Just not from me.

Brett Ellis’ explosive entry into the celebrity spotlight provides him with a charmed and enviable lifestyle. This begins to sour as his excesses in drugs, drink and sex take hold.
When he tries to get clean, marries his old girlfriend and struggles to establish a relationship with her daughter and his own estranged adolescent son, that’s when the fun starts. He is haunted by the ghost of his tyrannical father, and by the serial killer in American Psycho, his first novel, Patrick Bateman, who has taken on a shadowy human form.
In this roller coaster ride, complete with many horrible events, it may be hard to know who is what and what is really going on, but it doesn’t matter. This novel is impossible to put down.
The last three beautiful, lyrical pages had the desired effect, and justified reading the rest.

Ok jag vet inte vad jag hade väntat mig men inte det här. Så många lager! Älskade!

Difficult to assign a blunt 'stars out of five' rating to, this was slow and unlikeable for the majority of the first half, before vacillating between amazing and amazingly silly in the second half. The three-star rating I give this overall is not to reflect my opinion on this as 'average', it's an uncertain compromise for a book I was eventually uncertain about.

This novel is pseudo-autobiographical in tone, dealing with a writer called Bret Easton Ellis who became famous at a young age for writing the challenging and shocking books that the author actually wrote ('Less Than Zero', 'American Psycho', 'The Rules of Attraction' especially). The opening quarter of the book is heavy on the set-up of this character as a drug-addled, alcoholic, unreliable, unlikeable, wreck of a man. I found this part of the book hard to get through - a lack of sympathy with the character/narrator (I remained unsure for a long while about which parts were truth and which were fiction) meant I just found this all showy and vulgar and uninteresting.

The second half of the book was a lot better, as a story is woven out of the protagonist's attempts to restore his relationship with his new wife and her kids (his formerly estranged son and stepdaughter) and in adjusting to the death of his father some time previously. Without mentioning spoilers, the 'main' story is a complex and unusual one, clever and challenging - but (key for me) I felt the author did get away with it, despite the very strange plot.

So overall, I am very glad I read it. I just felt very bogged down with the first part of the book, and am not convinced whether this was necessary to set-up the character as he was, or if it could've been trimmed/lessened without any loss of impact in the latter half of the book.