Bret Easton Ellis, Meister der Autofiktion, stellt sich den Dämonen seiner Vergangenheit… mitreißend spannend, witzig, intelligent, großartig!

Solo un genio come Bret Easton Ellis poteva scrivere un libro come questo. Il protagonista è Bret Easton Ellis, uno scrittore che ha scritto tutti i libri di Bret Easton Ellis, ma non è il vero Bret Easton Ellis. Si tratta di un grandioso esempio di autofiction, giocato sul fil rouge del rapporto padre-figlio, in una spirale di orrore e incubi. Entra in top 3 di quest'anno di diritto.

"Al di là di quanto possano apparire orribili gli eventi qui descritti, c'è una cosa che dovete ricordare mentre tenete questo libro tra le mani: tutto ciò che leggerete è realmente accaduto, ogni parola è vera.
La cosa che mi ha tormentato di più? Dato che nessuno sapeva cosa stesse accadendo in quella casa, nessuno aveva paura per noi."

I feel funny now. No, this novel wasn't a how-to-be-a-comedian manual under the guise of some kind of fucked up, deranged horror. I feel FUNNY funny, strange funny, like someone touched me inappropriately and I don't know how I feel funny. Halfway through the book, I put it down and eyeballed my partner and started throwing existential crisis theories at him. I have this problem with depersonalization and derealization where in heightened states of anxiety you detach from your reality or your sense of self. Mostly it's triggered by standing in shopping centres and being overwhelmed with rage, disgust, fear and hunger but sometimes it's triggered by someone fucking with my head. As Bret Easton Ellis did with me with Lunar Park. Is this real, what is real, that's not real, is he in a psychotic meltdown, oh fuck, what's going on, somebody GET MY DAUGHTER'S FURBY OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE

No, just joking, I have more taste than to buy my daughter a furby let alone fill it with my haunted past so that it turns into a soul sucking demon bird crazed, fuck what is going on here. Alternating fear, discomfort and amusement. I didn't know how I felt. My confusedness is showing in my review. Okay, if you're a parent, one of your kids probably has a toy that creeps you the fuck out. You can't get rid of it because that would just be reinforcing the fact that a)you are insane and b)gutless. My daughter has this troll in a pink princess dress that creeps out anyone who touches it. My sister in law visited recently and she picked it up thinking it was some type of obese barbie doll but upon flipping it over, she was faced with the horrors of all horrors and she promptly dropped it. This doll definitely does things to me in my sleep, it probably watches me shower, swims in my urine when I forget to flush the toilet, is that little tickle on my foot at night that I imagine is the cat WHEN I KNOW IT REALLY ISN'T.

You may have thought I went off on a tangent there. You were right but a problem shared is a problem halved and now I feel better.

An engaging, original, satirical novel that reads initially like a memoir, morphs into a novel about a marriage breakdown, then becomes a horror novel with a haunted house and ghost. There is good plot momentum throughout this book.

The book starts with an overview of the author’s life and works. Yes, Bret Easton Ellis is the main character and narrator. In this book he is a narcissistic, self loathing drug addict who drinks lots. Jayne Dennis, a movie star and old girlfriend of Bret, who is the mother of his son, Robby, proposes marriage to Bret. Robby has been ignored by Bret for eleven years. Three months into the marriage Bret has started taking drugs again and is having an affair with a student. Things then become a little weird as boys disappear in the neighbourhood and there is a wave of grisly murders modeled on those of the author’s book, ‘American Psycho’. His father’s ghost appears making Bret freak out.

Ellis fans should find this book a very satisfying reading experience.

This book was first published in 2005.

My girlfriend is reading this book right now, so at night I always see the front cover as it hides her pretty face.

I've always been a fan of Bret. I loved Less than Zero, American Psycho, and Imperial Bedrooms. I didn't like Rules of Attraction ( good movie but the novel was too faggy love drunk for me.) And I hated Glammora and the Informers.

All in all, he's had an impressive career and I have read a few of his novels multiple times. American Psycho sticks out as his real masterpiece in contemporary transgressive literature.

That book was genius and I find it interesting that people label it misogynistic. To me it was a clear indictment on materialism, he objectified woman as a way to expound on that indictment but it had NOTHING to do with women, the same as it had nothing to do with designer clothing. I think Norman Mailer said it best, that Bret was taking on deep Dostoyevskian themes.

Most people that hated American Psycho hated it for legitimate reasons. The people that hate Lunar Park don't seem to understand it at all.


SPOILER ALERT

Lunar park is a deep, visceral, and brilliant novel. It is in fact much deeper than American Psycho, yet its darkness is washed out by sentimentality.

It starts out with a quasi-memoir of his past novels and early success. He skillfully included enough facts to make this seem like a legitimate recap of his life so far, although the tone becomes satirical by the end of the section.

His whole career dating back to his debut novel and including American Psycho have been about two central themes: apathy and narcissism. So it's only natural that he would move on to make the ultimate statement and turn the lens on himself, painting an apathetic and narcissistic caricature of what people believe Bret Easton Ellis would look like.

The tumultuous relationship with his father is brought up within the first few pages, drawn from sincerity you can feel, and if you're paying attention, making all the other career and lifestyle narration seem disingenuous.

Now the hyperbole fades back into supposed realism, but what it really is, is this crazy metaphorical and multifaceted look inside his brain.

Nothing past the first chapter should be taken literal and the supernatural stuff supports this.

Bret's character becomes his father, the alcoholism and disconnect are simply statements about their failed connection.

His marriage with jane is just a facade created by his dads disapproval of Bret's sexual ambiguity, and how unhinged his view on the nuclear family is because his own was so badly broken.

Robbie is emblematic of Bret's youth, of being misunderstood and having to deal with a father he felt lived on a different planet than him.

Clayton is Brett in the purgatory stage, when he found his own independence and wealth, and became an elusive and ghoulish figure to his disdainful father.

Brett Easton Ellis is such a talented writer that he throws in sophisticated social commentary, masquerading as lame and campy gimmickry. The turby doll, the video tapes, the general paranoiac tone, are all statements about post 9/11 hysteria and how far removed we had become in a very spooky time.

This novel could have been really something but it turned into a real dog’s breakfast. Crap all over the place. What a mess.

Reading Lunar Park was like watching one of those jovial interviews with major serial killers you can find on youtube. The reporter is alarmed/mortified/astonished to find himself quite liking this monster who slaughtered 17 human beings. You get this kind of dialogue -

-tHey Jeff, can you explain a little what would be going through your mind when you were drilling holes in those guys’ heads to make them into sex zombies?
-tOh, you know, pretty much the same that would be going through your mind when you’re trying to finish a tricky bit of DIY, John.
-tAw, that so, Jeff?
-tYeah, pretty much, John!
(they laugh ruefully.)

For the first 40 pages, Lunar Park sideswipes you with what appears to be a bizarrely truthful autobiographical account of BEE’s own life and career. Then it veers off into pure fiction when this version of Bret marries a famous movie star and winds up playing father to her two children. This first part is lots of fun. BEE portrays himself as a charming disarming kinda coke-guzzling drug-snorting alcoholic stumbling foggily through his revoltingly affluent day with attendant wife, kids, servants and girlfriend.

I was intrigued. I was thinking : Bret, where are you going with all this? It kept me turning the pages, and they were very easy to read, and even quite funny.
At this point the book appeared to be three things at the same time

-tA psychodrama about fathers and sons, laced with sadness
-tA light amusing satire of very rich parents, with every damn kid in the neighbourhood medicated up to the maximum legally permitted
-tAn increasingly vicious hateful self-portrait, circling brilliantly and fascinatingly around the psychological black hole that is American Psycho

But then it shimmies into a fourth thing which takes the rest of the story over and this is where the book drives over the cliff and smashes to bits on the rocks below, as it becomes a lame Stephen King story, or, since I’ve never read one of SK’s supernatural books, I should say, what I imagine rather contemptuously to be something SK might come up with : fiction written by the main character “Bret Easton Ellis” starts to come to life! Yes – it seems that Patrick Bateman himself has been freed from American Psycho and is stalking the pages of Lunar Park, and up to his old tricks too.

Yawn.

Yawny-yawn yawn yawnioh ho hmmmm.

Oh , also, we get the device of a child’s toy which (also) comes to life and turns homicidal. This takes up the last half of this novel.

How many times have these two devices been used before in horror fiction?

6,214. No, wait - 6,793. I was using slightly out of date figures.

Anyway, A LOT.

Bret, was that the best you could come up with?

By page 390 Bret is channeling Ghostbusters! And a little later, An American Werewolf in London!

HOW THIS NOVEL COULD HAVE BEEN GREAT

Throughout this long tale, the fictional BEE is haunted by the even more fictional Patrick Bateman. Just as, I guess, the real BEE is haunted by his own misogynistic horror of a novel. Here he is on page 181, not wanting to think about American Psycho :

I closed my eyes again. I did not want to go back to that book. It had been about my father (his rage, his obsession with status, his loneliness), whom I had transformed into a fictional serial killer… I had moved past the casual carnage that was so prevalent in the books I’d conceived in my twenties, past the severed heads and the soup made of blood and the woman [er, let’s skip that sentence]… Exploring that kind of violence had been “interesting” and “exciting” and it was all “metaphorical” anyway – at least to me at that moment of my life, when I was young and pissed off… I was “transgressive” and the book was really about “style”

When (in Lunar Park) it seems that some crazy guy is pretending to be Patrick Bateman and copying each murder from American Psycho, BEE comments:

This was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about : if anything happens to anyone as a result of the publication of this novel, Bret Easton Ellis was to blame… and that’s why the National Organisation of Women had boycotted the book… I thought the idea was laughable – that there was no one as insane or vicious as this fictional character out there in the real world. Besides, Patrick Bateman was a notoriously unreliable narrator, and if you actually read the book you could come away doubting that these crimes ever occurred. There were large hints that they existed only in Bateman’s mind. The murders and torture were in fact fantasies fueled by his rage and fury about how life in America was structured and how this had trapped him. The fantasies were an escape. This was the book’s thesis. It was about manners and mores, not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this?

I appreciated that this all sounds like a desperate attempt by BEE to convince himself that he had not written a horrible misogynistic novel. (And is the explanation adopted by AP's many fans). Now – if Lunar Park had continued to probe this clearly-still-open wound within BEE, and maybe ask why, in describing BEE’s father’s rage, or Patrick Bateman’s fury at how life in America was structured, it had to be demonstrated through the torture and dismemberment of women, and not by some other means (say, planting bombs in subways – there are many ways to express a general rage), then we would have got something fascinating. But it was not to BEE. Instead, a lot of supernatural malarkey which – once again – is all about BEE’s relationship with his father and (fictional) son. In other words, it’s all about him. What a narcissist.

TWO AND A HALF STARS

I liked the satire, I liked the sudden-left-turn weirdness (until it became ridiculous), it wasn’t boring at all. It was stupid (for all its preening intelligence) but it wasn’t dull.

YELLOW LEGAL PADS

a yellow legal pad that she would mark up and casually refer back to (p288)

What is it with Americans and their yellow legal pads? If I had £1 (=$1.23) for each time somebody uses a yellow legal pad in an American novel I could afford that world cruise. Don’t they ever come in any other colour? No blue legal pads? Always yellow? Always legal?

Sucked

That's all six of his novels now read. He hasn't written a novel for quite a few years now, and I do hope, after reading Lunar Park, we get more. This might not have had the same impact that Glamorama and Less than Zero had on me, but I think it's on a par with what I thought about American Psycho. There were parts that seriously creeped me out. Like, for example, when a demonic Terby doll crawled inside the anus of a pet dog and took it over - couldn't help but think of Chucky from Child's Play. It's written as a sort of postmodern narcissistic ghost story with Bret Easton Ellis the narrator in his own book. There are nods towards the suburban horrors of Wes Craven and John Carpenter, and the writer Stephen King. But you know you're in a Bret Easton Ellis novel all right due to the Xanax, Klonopin, alcohol, Prada sweatshirts and tan loafers, to name but a few things. It is also, like American Psycho, a hall of mirrors. Even detective Donald Kimball makes an appearance. Or does he? Underneath though, the novel reverberates strongly with Bret's past of the abused child of a hateful father, which he failed to confront, and thus comes back to haunt him - literally.

There is a killer re-enacting the murders of Patrick Bateman, who apparently was based on Robery Ellis, who died in 1992. Here, there are two phantoms plaguing BEE - one from beyond the grave, and the other from the pages of American Psycho. It wouldn't be the same without the satire, and that comes in the form of a sort of family sitcom. Along with Bret, the writer, who is; or at least was, in the process of writing his next novel called Teenage Pussy, and who is very much falling off the wagon, there is the fragile marriage to his wife, Jayne, her six-year-old daughter, Sarah, fathered by another man, and the 11-year-old resentful son, Robby. He isn't doing to well when it comes to the business of fatherhood, due to his constant drug abuse and the fact he is trying to woo a student at the college where he teaches because she happens to be writing her thesis on his work.

And then, if there wasn't enough to chew on already, a lot of spooky supernatural shit starts to kick in . . .

Darkly comic and genuinely horrific in places, this novel is Ellis's best work since his debut, Less Than Zero. Writing in the first person as a bizarre alcoholic, drug-addicted parody of himself, Ellis takes us on a dark journey into his celebrity lifestyle: married to an A-list Hollywood actress, father of a son he's estranged from, living in upstate New York

There are various plot strands ranging from Ellis's troubled relationship with his dead father, the disappearance of a number of boys from his son's school, to the activities of a serial killer who is apparently copying the killings from Ellis's earlier novel American Psycho.

The book is a fantastic read, easily the most enjoyable Ellis novel I've read. Yes his trademark cynicism is there along with the sense of fear and dislocation, but there is a new maturity to some of his writing, especially at the end, which is both moving and elegiac.

This is not a novel for a first timer to dive into. You'd be better off starting at the beginning with Less Than Zero. But for those who have read his earlier stuff, I'd recommend this.

I once had a book entitled something such as "100 Books to Read Before You Die." I don't recall the title really, but the author did some math using the average time it takes to read a book, and the multiplied that by the number of days you have to live if you're age is 20, 30, 40, etc. and then arrived at an estimate of how many books you can read in your remaining life. So, for example, if I'm 50 and live 25 more years maybe I'll read 200 more books. (What's he's saying here is "Choose wisely. Don't read crap.") That's 8 per year on average, which is probably fairly accurate since I'm a slow reader, I don't finish a lot of the books I start because I lose interest, and because I'm not a continuous reader like some--I'm a continual reader. This means I don't read books non-stop, finish a book, go to take a pee or grab a beer and my next book, and start read the next in line. I finish a book and then I might not start another one for a few days or a few weeks, but eventually I will. That's the difference between the words continuous and continual by the way. I learned that by reading a book. Continuous means unending, like the flow of a river. Continual means unending but with occasional stops, like eating or rain or whatever. It's sort of like the difference between sensuous and sensual. No. Actually, it's not like that at all. Not even close. Especially not in the "Animal House" sense, which is where I learned the difference between the two words. Sensuous just means appeals to the senses. Wow, that was a sensuous sunset. Sensual is like one of those portmanteau words made from sensuous and sexual. Wow, that was a sensual dance i.e. it made me think of sex. So what's the point of all this? You've just spent 3 minutes of your life reading about the definitions of words (I wanted you to get at least something for your time), when you could have spent those 3 minutes reading a good book. I spent some number of hours (too many) reading this book and I don't feel like I got my money's worth. Could I go back in time I would have chosen a different book. Stephen King said of Ellis' much-adored-by-horror-fans "American Psycho" it was a [boring book written by a good writer]. I would agree with that in this case too, except I didn't really feel like he was that good of a writer (I liked "Less Than Zero," but for different reasons.) Somewhere in the last few pages Ellis says he's learned something about "how lonely people make life" and then "that a family - if you allow it - gives you joy, which in turn gives you hope." Yeah. Whatever. That's depressing, not scary.

I first began reading this book at a Borders outside Philadelphia in August 2005, not too long, perhaps even within the very same week, of its publication. The first chapter "the beginnings" is a marvelous parade of literary gossip, all neon and candy - Ellis guides the reader through the downward spiral of his Glamorama book tour. As stated in other reviews at this website, this chapter is the chief highlight of the novel and can stand alone, feeding and fueling the desire of lit-fanatics who desire to know how it all started and where it all went wrong. The remainder of the book is a psychological study in mental dissolution and a decent pastiche and parody of horror-story haunted-house paperbacks that line the shelves, that have become the shelves.

I was especially grateful for chapter 13, "parent/teacher night" wherein Ellis describes the writer's almost pathological need to paper over the shredded wallpaper of his or her psyche in order to deal with common trivialities and uncommon terrors of day-to-day reality. A writer's physical life is basically one of stasis, and to combat this constraint, an opposite world and another self have to be constructed daily (pgs. 146-147) Daily. That's horrible. Daily. Imagine the work, if it had been done, of daily tearing down and rebuilding the Emerald City set during the filming of Wizard of Oz and shrink-ray that pressure into a human vessel. Yet getting the work done, getting the film in the can. Incredible - but it can be done, is done, because this is what a writer does: his life is a maelstorm of lying (pg. 146).

Back to that Borders in Philadelphia. I was not able to purchase the book for a few reasons, chief among them that all my books were packed for a move. Years went by. More moves. And then I started reading Lunar Park several years ago. I failed to make it beyond the first chapter once again, but for reasons I cannot recall. Probably laziness. I seem to recall flipping through the other pages of the book and getting the general gist of the novel and figuring that that was enough. After that, I still enjoyed Ellis' work, his Imperial Bedrooms, the movie adaptation of The Informers and the original movie The Canyons, and a reread of Less Than Zero. But, recently, during a trip to the library I picked up Lunar Park and figured to give it another shot. I have no idea why, other than pickings are slim at present - the season of Must Reads by Big Authors is over, what with it being December, the New Arrivals at the library all celebrity cookbooks and Christmas Decor for the Family of Four type stuff.

I admit that as I neared the end of this novel, I became a little freaked out, what with it being night and all. Not only night, but after midnight. It was preposterous: the haunted house subplot, the evil doll subplot, are tired tropes straight out of Twilight Zone...but Ellis provided the prose in describing These Events a sort of hypnotic quality - the staccato of realtime reportage (a phrase I immediately despise typing, but there it is. There it stands).

Of special note were pages 305-308, where Ellis hits the poetic height of the novel and, perhaps, his oeuvre, as he describes the release of his father's ashes from a fishing boat not only into the air but into time and time's country cousin, time's dopey doppelganger, literature, into the very pages of Lunar Park itself.

If you are still here, reading this, well then you're alone.

3.5/5

I'm not the most well-read guy on Bret Easton Ellis, not by a long shot. And I should be better read considering I enjoy the guys writing style quite a bit. I like the minimalist style, and I enjoy his brand of satire.

But it was interesting to me how he made a memoir that was mostly fiction, and used that to examine a bunch of different themes such as family or even writing. That he made it a suburban gothic horror makes it even more fascinating.

I won't pretend to understand everything as it's a bit of a psychological mindfuck, but I got the general idea. I enjoyed the beginning where he looked back at his career and enjoyed it the entire way through. I wouldn't say I was really grabbed most of the time but I was also never bored.

As a horror it mostly succeeds. There were actually a couple scenes that I really liked that scared me. When he goes on his computer and finally watches the video, that was the high point for me. It creeped me out. It's obvious Ellis is a talented writer because he pulls off psychological horror, satire and a memoir all in the same book. It's true that most of the book isn't really true, but it's still cool to think about what part is drawn (and clearly exaggerated) from his real life.

Lunar Park isn't a favourite of mine but it was a good read, and the mish-mash of genres especially appealed to me. Check it out, it's not nearly as bad as some of the reviews here say. But keep in mind that I also liked Glamorama.