LUNAR PARK is a bit of a departure for Bret Easton Ellis in that it's more of a traditional page-turner than anything else he has previously written. It's also a lot less cynical and gratuitously shocking than most of his previous work. In the novel, Ellis himself is the main character, and he does an brilliant job of blurring the lines between autobiography and fiction. Interestingly, he seems to take especial delight in presenting as negative an image of himself as possible, making for a highly amusing--but not terribly sympathetic--narrator. The story is an odd mix of dark comedy and horror, but, as this is a Bret Easton Ellis novel, the book is also replete with rich subtext, poetic descriptions, and copious amounts of scenes portraying addiction and drug abuse. Apart from the ending, which left me a little confused on some points, I found LUNAR PARK to be a memorable, thoroughly enjoyable novel, and one of Ellis' best.

I heard a lot of great things about this book, but i wasn't that impressed. It was just a little too over the top. Admittedly, this over the top aspect made it really amusing; the plot is basically that Bret Easton Ells (by writing himself in as the protagonist, he 'does an impression of himself') is in his 40's and still throwing big parties during which he offers mediocre coke to his guest and then steals away to his office to do enormous lines of much better coke. He's got a wife and kids and doesn't really care too much about them-- their existence in his life is more than anything else an example of his futile attempt to get sober. Basically the story begins to unfold when he tries to get a Furby for his daughter, but they're all sold out. So he asks his coke dealer to get him one, which leads to a lot of, well, fucked up shit. Without giving away too much, the book's most interesting characteristic is that it somehow slides from autobiography into a tongue-in-cheek Stephen King parody (the horror scenes of which involve the Furby). Funny, but not nearly as good as his other books.

3.5

“the reason i was there had nothing to do with her but that i was just trying to locate some place where i might find the will to live again”

it’s great happenstance that i picked this up after the shards last year because i think you can see a lot of that book in this! BEE clearly loves to get very specific when it comes to detailing the opulence (and sedation) of the ultra wealthy, here through the eyes of a coked out writer, and i love reading about it so the first 75% of this was really enjoyable. he’s SO good at crafting a creepy atmosphere too, when it came to the part with the videos i had to stop reading that night because i was getting so freaked out lmao.

BEE explains this book as an homage to stephen king and the other horror books he read as a kid, a sort of "haunted house book" that ended up being influenced by the death of his father and the things he had gone through at the time of writing, which explains where this book eventually ends up. unfortunately the back quarter of this book is where it lost me. While I did like some elements of the ending, how we get there and some plot lines didn't feel developed enough to not feel a bit... corny? i don't know if that's how i actually want to describe it but it's hard to explain without giving too much away. i think there were ultimately just too many elements contributing to the "haunting" and it ended up feeling very frenzied and all over the place. granted paranormal has always been a hard sell for me in any book so that plot line at least could be chalked up to personal preference.

the reason i bring up the shards though is that it feels like a more refined take on what he was trying to do here in lunar park when it comes to the mix of autobiographical, fiction and thriller elements. so it's cool to see what he took from here and built off of. i think if you really love the shards and want to scratch that same itch you can get it here for the most part but i would go into this expecting the ending to not land as cleanly.

I saw a guy on the tube in London reading this and noticed he was near the end. I wanted to stand up and say, "Hey, it's creeping you out, isn't it. Isn't it?! ISN'T IT!!!?" But you just can't live your life that way. It's inappropriate.

Bret Easton Ellis, on the other hand, can do whatever the hell he wants. And he does. Putting yourself in a novel is either the ballsiest thing you can do, or the assy-est. In this case, both. But let's put aside the fact that Ellis is writing a tale about semi-pseudo Ellis. It's also a damn disturbing ride, and the fact that he had the nerve to treat himself the way he treats all his other characters, facing off with self-disemboweling dogs and "the world is more horrible than we pretend" madness, is just cold, man. Cold.

Update 6/3/2021--my thoughts on all BEE fiction to date: https://youtu.be/BjEOzV2iIZ8

Original Review
At times it felt like this book was a very cheesy and bad impression of Bret Easton Ellis. At other times I felt like it was a genuine mixed genre postmodern story spun by one of the masters of transgressive fiction. The first 30 or so pages are really fun to read because of the memoir Ellis spins for himself. Obviously it gets a little hard to separate fact from fiction.

The theme of this book is really Fathers and Sons. Bret hated his dad, claiming in this book that Patrick Bateman was based on his father, and now Robby is extremely ambivalent and hostile to Bret. That mixed with the whole Hamlet motifs that constantly pop up (Osric Hotel, Fortinbras Mall, Ophelia Blvd.) point to the whole Dad and ghost mantra.

Like I said there was a bit of cheesiness to it because at the heart of it, it's a horror story. It's not overly complicated and the foreshadowing is very evident. I felt like a lot of things are really easy to see coming. The one wild card is Robby. At one point there seems to be full reconciliation and then the rug's pulled out for no apparent reason and he decides he's ambivalent and hostile and needs to runaway. I get the "theme"' of running away, but I didn't see the purpose in it. The cynic in me says it's because Ellis can't end a story sentimentally where the son and father live in harmony. Because sentimentalism is such an Empire literary device.

Regardless, I would recommend this to any Bret Easton Ellis fan as long as they had read Less Than Zero and American Psycho first. I didn't labor through it, and honestly I'd probably give 2.5 stars if I could. I might give it three later on. Who knows?

this is definitely the most avant-garde/experimental book ive ever read. Not being able to separate reality from fiction is a part of most horror/gothic novels like this but the fact that this is not only marketed as an autobiography, but also appears to be one for the most part is very unsettling.

I don't know if I would have liked this if I hadn't read this for school. I definitely would have never picked it up. But im super glad I did cause I genuinely thought this was an extremely creative, innovative book.

Il libro è semiautobiografico.
Parla di uno scrittore, Bret Easton Ellis, giunto al successo con un libro decadente e perverso (Meno di zero... nei primi anni del liceo un amico lo aveva comprato e ce lo eravamo letto tutti quanti, ovviamente all'epoca mi aveva colpito enormemente) per poi bissare il successo con l'ancora più sconvolgente American Psycho (che mi ha fatto letteralmente schifo, privo di senso).
Uno scrittore che, giunto all'apice della fama, vive di droghe e alcool, incapace di mantenere una relazione o di trovare un senso nella propria vita.
Una situazione familiare disastrosa alle spalle, una relazione critica con il padre.

Sembra la sua autobiografia, completa di tour promozionali, idee, icnontri per i film tratti dai romanzi.

Poi la parte reale scompare, e si passa all'horror.

Perché Bret, che nel frattempo per tentare di salvarsi si è sposato con la vecchia fidanzata Jayne dalla quale aveva avuto un figlio mai riconosciuto, si ritrova al centro di fenomeni paranormali e di una situazione familiare anche più critica di quella che aveva abbandonato da tempo.
Un figlio che non lo riconsoce e che non vuole avere niente a che fare con lui.
Entrambi i bambini sotto psicofarmaci, come secondo la moda del momento per i figli di genitori ricchi. Problematici e drogati fin da piccoli, costretti a strafare per entrare già dalle elementari in ottica Ivy League.
Una moglie attrice che spesso è fuori casa, affidando i figli a tate e personale di servizio.
Il terrore strisciante che cattura tutti gli abitanti della zona, mentre sempre più ragazzini scompaiono nel nulla per non essere più ritrovati. Fughe? Rapimenti? Il terrore di ogni genitore. Bret compreso.

Poi ci sono gli omicidi.
Qualcuno sta compiendo nella zona omicidi efferati, seguendo pari pari quanto compiuto da Patrick nel libro di Ellis, American Psycho.
E lo stesso Patrick sembra quasi materializzarsi, mostrarsi allo scrittore.

E assieme a Patrick, il soprannaturale.

Luci che vanno e vengono nella casa, pupazzi che diventano vivi e voraci, strane creature, strane ombre, mail misteriose legate alla morte del padre, addirittura un video della morte del padre.
Macchine fantasma, strani fenomeni atmosferici, la casa stessa che si trasforma poco a poco nella vecchia casa dove Bret aveva vissuto da piccolo.

Il mondo creato dalla penna di Ellis prende vita poco a poco, mentre le sue creazioni si scontrano con lo spettro paterno.
Qualcuno gli vuole dare un avvertimento, qualcun altro non vuole farglielo avere.
Lo scrittore in lui prende appunti, mentre lui vorrebbe solo scappare, fuggire, nascondersi e drogarsi.



E alla fine, quando si fa un minimo di chiarezza su quanto successo... non si chiarisce un bel niente.
La scomparsa di Robbie, l'identità di Clayton, la presenza delle creature nate dai suoi racconti, la presenza del padre.
Niente di niente.
Spiegazioni fumose e solamente abbozzate, accenni e nient'altro.


Il libro si lascia leggere con piacere, ma alla fine è frustrante il non arrivare a nessuna conclusione definitiva.
E dato che l'unico pregio era la scorrevolezza e il fatto che non si facesse odiare, non ho certo un buon parere del libro stesso.
No, decisamente Ellis non fa per me.

The announcement of n  The Shardsn' January publication kicked my ass into finishing Bret Easton Ellis' backlist, and with this, I am officially caught up.

For whatever reason, Lunar Park is the novel of his I've avoided the longest. I'm not sure why, given that my track record with metafiction and autofiction is a mostly-positive one. Maybe because I've heard it referred to as a Hamlet retelling, or because it's a family story and I tend not to be that interested in either retellings or family stories.

Or maybe because it's one of those books where you probably shouldn't read until you've finished all his other books and can pick up on the fact that the dog is named after the main character in Glamorama (and that the Terby-dog scene is, I think, a callback to a very, very horrible scene in Glamorama that to date still makes me nauseous to think about) or that Jay McInerney's presence in this book is a reference to the fact that Jay McInerney's characters have appeared before in Ellis' novels. These references were fun to pick out, especially given how recent most of Ellis' bibliography is in my head.

So I liked the metafiction aspects, and I thought the characters were done very well. Oddly, the best way I think I can describe the way Ellis writes characters is that, spiritually, they're very similiar to the way Waugh writes characters. They have the same knack for capturing people in only a few sentences, natural ears for dialogue, and talent for satrizing society without seeming out-of-touch. Despite the fact that I was a child when this book was published (right around Sarah's age, actually), his satire of early-mid 2000s culture, especially around children, made me weirdly nostalgic. I remember my mom banning Bratz Dolls because she thought they dressed, shall we say, inapproriately, the sight of tube-tops and mini-skirts and shirts with words like "Sassy Girl" and "Baby Doll" in glittery bubble-letters being sold in the kid's section at Target. And so much faux fur and animal-print, 70s hookers would be jealous. Just 2000s kid things, I guess.

What didn't really work for me was when the novel turned, towards the middle-end, into a fairly conventional, Stephen-King-esque horror story. I've liked Stephen King, but him and Ellis rest in two different categories of authors, and it does feel a bit, beneath him maybe (God, I sound so snobby), to write a story like that. Also I'm starting to realize that maybe I just don't love conventional horror stories. All of this to say that I could do without Terby (Also Y, Bret is terribly, terribly, horribly dumb and he should be ashamed of himself for that one).

I did think Ellis' writing shone at times, particularly in the parts about his relationship between his (presumably real) father and (fictional) son. There's real pain in there, I think. I also have to mention that his characterization of himself is, well, unflattering at best. If this is accurate to how he feels about himself, it's interesting how someone who clearly hates himself so much doesn't come across as doing so at all. In the interviews I've watched and read, my impression of him has been an affable guy who likes to talk to people and probably has a screw loose somewhere. But at the same time, he writes very dark fiction almost exclusively about terrible people and has stated that a lot of his books and characters are drawn from his own experiences, and his own personality- including Patrick Bateman. I guess what I'm saying is, from a psychological perspective this book is fascinating.

If I were to rank all my personal enjoyment of BEE works, I'd say: 1. Less Than Zero, 2. The Rules of Attraction, 3. White, 4. American Psycho, 5. Lunar Park, 6. Glamorama, 7. The Informers, 8. Imperial Bedrooms. If I were to rank them in terms of whether you, the unknown everyperson, should read them I would say: 1. American Psycho, 2. Less Than Zero, 3. The Rules of Attraction, 4. Glamorama, 5. Lunar Park, 6. The Informers, 7. White-Imperial Bedrooms (tie).

Första halvan är riktigt bra. Andra halvan när Lunar Park förvandlas till en blandning av Stephen Kings The Dark Half (som är en av Kings böcker som jag gillar minst) och en monsterfilm med Exorcisten-vibbar är den inte lika bra. Jag antar att jag gillar Ellis som mest när det håller sig inom ramen för vad som faktiskt kan hända. Men när Lunar Park är bra så är den riktigt bra. Ellis skriver: ”En författares fysiska tillvaro är i grunden statisk och för att kämpa mot denna begränsning måste vi dagligen konstruera en värld och ett jag som är raka motsatsen.” Och det summerar boken ganska bra. En sak är säker, jag kommer läsa allt som Ellis har skrivit framöver!

3.5 stars rounded down for steeply falling off after the midway mark. The first half was real funny, tons of LOLs, totally audacious comedy masquerading as autofiction masquerading as Hamlet-referencing horror. But then the language and insights and humor fell away in favor of just-the-facts one-line-per-paragraph plot execution. Lack of plot in BEE's first three novels totally works -- but this one's self-consciously consumed by its outline (his narrator even refers to the "writer" who would otherwise fill out certain spare plotty bits). Ultimately, a totally audacious, intentionally uneven, easy-reading take on one writer's serious daddy issues (and some good thoughts re: writing, fame, drugs/addiction, kids, and a very funny bit re: bachelorhood etc). A bit of a disappointment for me, but an excellent example of writing that refuses "to embrace the mechanics of East Coast lit conventionality" while nevertheless being published by Random House's high-end literary outfit. Also interesting in terms of how it joyously loads up a tall sacrificial pyre of supernatural, irreal, and metafictional aspects instead of observing the rule to only introduce a single fantastic element and keep everything else realistic, a la Kafka. But in the end, even if pulling off the mask of good writing thematically associates with pulling off masks of fame or notoriety or layers of emotionlessness related to one's angry upbringing, it didn't make for much more than stripped-down reading that made the author's possibly earnest revelations re: family and father and self etc -- no matter how "hard won" or serious -- seem as cheap to me as the intentionally unwriterly language. But, for fans, the first chapter or so where he summarizes his career is deliciously funny and pretty much worth the sticker price.

Si resulta que los lectores creen que el mundo es estúpido y superficial y mezquino, entonces [Bret Easton] Ellis puede escribir una novela estúpida, superficial y mezquina que se convierta en un comentario mordaz e inexpresivo sobre el mal estado de todas las cosas.
David Foster Wallace sobre American Psycho, entrevista para Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993.

La temprana muerte de DFW nos arrebató, además de unas cuantas buenas novelas, el mejor beef literario que la literatura norteamericana había tenido desde, yo qué sé... el de Hemingway vs Faulkner, por ejemplo.

El caso es que siendo yo más admirador de Wallace que de Ellis, mi opinión siempre ha pivotado hacia esa idea sensiblera de que la literatura posmoderna debía ser capaz de superar la ironía y el juego inocuo para volver a tratar temas serios y humanos con emoción y convicción.

Resulta que Lunar Park es, de las que yo he leído, la obra de Ellis que más abiertamente trata temas humanos, y lo hace alejándose de la inexpresividad y tacañería narrativa que caracterizaban a Menos que Cero. Resulta que además lo hace siendo —entre otras cosas— una novela de terror, género que en EEUU se considera absolutamente menor. Esta transición le valió en su día críticas y comentarios irónicos. Ellis era un escritor serio y no se comprendía su deriva hacia la literatura "de género". Ya sea por jugueteo posmoderno (destrucción de la distinción entre "alta" y "baja" cultura) o por sincera admiración, el caso es que Ellis citó a Stephen King como una de sus mayores inspiraciones a la hora de escribir Lunar Park. Esto provocó que Stephen King leyera el libro y escribiera un artículo defendiéndolo con una última frase que resume las virtudes de esta obra de forma fantástica: "Este es un libro que progresa desde lo oscuro y lo banal a la luz y la epifanía con sorprendente fuerza y convicción".

Nunca sabremos qué opinaba Wallace de este libro, pero ojalá le reconociera a Ellis el mérito de escribir desde la posmodernidad y el terror una novela que trata sin pudor temas verdaderamente humanos.

i was a little attracted to him