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.

No tengas hijos.

This is probably the strangest book I've ever read. I didn't like it very much.

Ellis seems to be unable to make up his mind as to what the book's story is about - it starts off depicting his earlier life (sex, drugs, booze, more sex and drugs) before it drifts over into an alcoholic trying to bond with his son, then suddenly things are possessed, the house is haunted, there is someone abducting young boys, a serial killer is on the loose, his marriage is falling apart, his son hates him, he's being stalked, and then the monsters arrive.

A talented author could have made it work, but either Ellis just... isn't, or this is one of his low points. Everything seems mashed together, fragmented, like Ellis kept on visiting the NaNoWriMo forums looking for ways to kick-start his plot. Actually, that's what it read like - a car that keeps on dying, but the owner just won't let it go in peace.

The only vaguely interesting bits were the scenes involving the Terby or the hair monster, but that's simply because by that time I was starved for ANYTHING that would grasp my attention. The book starts off by making so many references to drugs and sex that I'm afraid I'll catch an STD simply by touching it, and then it bores me silly for three hundred pages until expert of all things supernatural Bob Miller (and his sidekicks Sam and Dale) arrive with their EMFs and I could pretend I was reading Supernatural fanficton instead.

Lastly, a possessed not-toy crawls in through the family dog's anus and takes possession of its body, turning it into a werewolf-like thing with wings.

Yes, it's one of those books.

Bret honey what is this

EDIT: nah what was I doing giving this 4 stars I can’t stop thinking about it and I keep getting emails from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks.

"How lonely people make life. But also I realized what I hadn't learned from him: that a family - if you allow it - gives you joy, which in turn gives you hope."

I’m a pretty big BEE fan, and I love his cool, detached writing style, and how all his books are slightly deranged. I love how the protagonists are always a bit off – a big part of you detests them, a little bit of you feels sorry for them, and a tiny piece of you is jealous of the seemingly glamorous lives they live (the sex, drugs, parties, dining at Spago with supermodels stuff…not the ax murder Patrick Bateman stuff).

Lunar Park is a bit different, because while I felt the expected pity and disgust toward the main character in the beginning of the novel, toward the end he made a turn for the better and I found myself somewhat invested in him. The story follows an accomplished and somewhat unhinged author (named, err, Bret Easton Ellis), as he tries to settle into a “normal life” of marriage and fatherhood. The book is semi-autographical, in that the background of the main character is based on the author’s real life (several references to and quotes from BEE’s past novels are cited); but the story itself is mostly fictional.

The satire and social commentary BEE is known for is definitely not missing from the book. Whereas his past books commented on the casual drug abuse in the 80s and 90s by social upscale slackers, I found it interesting that the most shocking form of drug use (abuse?) in Lunar Park is by children, by prescription. But this is just a side note to the main story of Lunar Park, which is basically a ghost story. And it’s really quite scary – complete with ghosts, stalkers, poltergeists, a demonic Furby-like doll coming to life, and an appearance of Patrick Bateman.

Overall, there were parts that didn’t seem to fit together quite right, and the ending left me slightly confused about certain things, but the story kept me riveted. It was almost refreshing to read BEE’s writing after having a break from him for so long (I hadn’t read one of his books since college), and I think he has a truly original voice.

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).

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.

3.5 stars. If you went into this book looking for more of the American Psycho type theme or style you'll be sorely disappointed. This is not American Psycho and it's not Less Than Zero, though both novels are alluded to frequently and central to the plot. It felt as if this were B.E.E.'s breakup with those books, with that jaded and bleak worldview, and even (kind of sadly for me) that style of repetitive imagery as metaphor.

This is a story about family and ghosts – real and metaphorical, and about fighting to hold on to and let go of them both.

I think if you get out of your head that this is another in a line of Ellis' books depicting nihilism via over the top sex and/or violence you stand a much better chance of enjoying, the book for what it is, not what you want it to be.

This was a great read told from a very unique perspective. Ellis takes horror, drama, and satire and crams them into a story to make something new. I highly recommend this only if you've read American Psycho first.

Brett Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park is his attempt at writing a meta horror novel. Like the novel that followed LP , The Shards, Ellis makes himself the main protagonist and is semi autobiographical.

This time Eloïse has remarried his wife and is trying to settle into domestic normality but after a rather drug fueled bender of a party, he discovers that his house is haunted by some sort of malevolent spirit which is bringing up the worst aspects of his youth.

This is the crux of Lunar Park, this is a novel about father/son relationships. Throughout the book Ellis worries about his childhood and whether he is a good dad to his son. Needles to say that the book ends in a way that Bret Easton Ellis can only pull off.

Writing is gorgeous, the horror moments are genuinely frightening and when the story goes crazy, it does. Another great one!

A wildly funny send-up of autofiction, an effective parody of suburban novels that's cut with moments of lacerating family drama, a smart metafictional structure that doesn't quite deliver on its promises, hoary horror and haunted house cliches that threaten to capsize the book, and a breathtaking final paragraph.
3.5 stars.

Meghan O'Rourke makes an interesting case for Brett Easton Ellis and his body of work, but I doubt I'll read his newest novel, Lunar Park. Her defense, appearing in Slate, advances a smart and elegant defense made for Ellis and his fellow ‘80’s “Brat Packers” Jay McInerney, Mary Gaitskill, and Tama Janowitz, most tellingly in the collection Shopping in Space: Essays on America's Blank Generation edited by Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney.British critics all, these American Studies specialists made the case that this “Blank Generation” set of then-young novelists were the most telling and single most important development of the Novel In English, forming a kind of permanent “High Postmodernist” tone through which fiction will give the lie to horrible flatness that is the truth when consumerism irrevocably replaces culture.

A grim determinist view, yes, estimating that inner life is no more than a vaguely self aware mirror that desperately wants to conform to the sheer appearance of beauty and lean design as it’s conveyed by cruel corporations and their marketing departments. It was the perfect line of defense to have in a decade where deconstruction and simulacra were prime subjects in every pedant’s droning mantra. O’Rourke reinvigorates the argument made then as a means of defending Ellis and his new book, and it’s admirable that she nearly had me convinced. What sinks the whole enterprise, however, is an unspoken insistence that graphic and precise descriptions and expositions of what shallow, drooling Pavlov dogs we can be do not suffice as literary art, an art that I would insist get inside situations and personalities rather than hover in godly fashion over the mess. It’s the difference between being in a traffic helicopter over the freeway and actually being behind the wheel, in the midst of it all.

The problem with making a case for a writer who has been on the outs with mainstream critics is that the plausible case gets passed up altogether and overstatement becomes the rule. Gigantism is one of Ellis's flaws, the mistake that accumulation equals worth, value and importance. Sometimes it works, yet even writers who have written long and brilliant books like Jonathan Franzen with Strong Motion will produce a long and profoundly under-edited dud like The Corrections. Franzen needed an honest and ruthless editor to give him back a blue-penciled manuscript with the instructions to make the novel work. Ellis would have benefited greatly from the same advice.

He has always struck me as someone who could be perfectly fine crime novelist, an edgy combination of James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard, if he weren't so busy gussying up his sensationalist subjects with the window dressing of eviscerated narcissism. Certainly his knowing jibes and dissections of ritual consumerism and attending worship of material accumulation have a spot in an America that is exhausting its credit cards to amass more and more of what they cannot take to heaven, but there are limits to how long a reader can gaze into an abyss, or listen to the limitless chatter of character minds that have lost a soul-giving personality. Crime fiction, a form predicated on supreme measures of reserve and clinical flatness, might have been an ideal medium for the rigor mortised humanity he loves to describe constructing the means of their own destruction. The procedural aspects would have imposed some properly ascribed limits on his story lines, and enabled him to write with greater aim.Mailer is exactly right on this point, which is to say that a novelist, even a satirist, needs to be more than a taker of inventories. American Psycho, after all was said and done with brand names, inane opinions on eighties bands, and hack-and-stab remedies for the extreme cases of ennui, is a rather over packed and hastily scribed effort that Ellis needed to finish to fulfill his contract with his publisher. Style and grace, the measures of comedic timing and the required component for wit to sting deeper , is absent from that book, and was in even sparser supply with Glamorama, a large house of a book with many, many unfurnished rooms.

Elements of Ellroy and Leonard are already present in Ellis's work--Ellroy's amoral universe meets Leonard's penchant for sharp observation and satire. The crime genre would have liberated Ellis from struggling to write through his themes under the crushing burden of art, the biggest drag on his effectiveness as a writer. Not that crime novels cannot be artful, as fans of Ellroy , Leonard, James Burke and Mark Costello can attest; the difference is that these writers are artful, describing a skilled application of craft, and not arty, Ellis’s vice, which conveys pose, pose, pose.

To me, Easton Ellis is a more stylized Hubert Selby Jr. Both are cataloging modes of spiritual deprivation.

An interesting comparison and one worth considering. Both are chroniclers of the ways New York will brutalize your soul and kill it, but I'm inclined to give the nod to Selby over Ellis because Hubert used the arc of tragedy to make the violence and desperations of Last Exit to Brooklyn's arresting. One by one, each fantasy and delusion is smashed. It's not a new trick, but it is hard to do believably, and I admire Selby's ability to delicately use a blatant literary device to achieve his drama. Drama is the word.
And I can't consider Ellis as "more stylized" than Selby. Ellis, in fact, is the more conservative prose writer of the two.

I think of Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French "new novelist" who wanted to strip all elements of convenient psychological convolutions, all tangible human feeling, and instead produce a novel of pure, unsullied description. In many ways, Ellis is a very French writer. Remember the last words in American Psycho: No Exit. The fact that Sartre's famous title appears on a sign introduces another tip of the hat to ideas that have seduced Ellis in college, semiotics.

One of Easton Ellis' favorite writers is Joan Didion, who began Play It As It Lays with the precept of writing " a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all....white space. Empty space...."

He admires Joan Didion, which is swell, but the reason he doesn't write like her is due to his awareness that cannot do what she is able do with her characters in her supremely crafted deadpan style. There is a humanity lurking around behind the eyes of her men and women, battered, shattered, horribly damaged with consumption, violence, money and drugs, but there are personalities, beautifully realized, that are imperfectly trying to make do in a world they no longer have faith in. This is a large part of what makes Didion compelling and worth the effort. Finding the moral vacuum in any age has never been a problem for novelists, it's what kind of witness you wind up being once you find it. Didion has that perhaps capacity to be curious about the humanity of her characters. It's a demonstration of narrative mastery that Ellis hasn't shown.

Even Mailer, when he finally came upon his real life White Negro in the form of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore (in The Executioner's Song, changed his style of writing, going from the high rhetoric and flighty philosophizing and fashioned instead a terse style in which his normally ubiquitous personality was absent, leaving only a complex and moving story to tell with every amount of craft he could muster and sustain. Mailer changed his music, his style and his thinking about his particular set of ideas through his five plus decades as a professional writer, which has made him someone worth returning to.

She is interested in what people are doing to themselves as they try to change the world, a curiosity that brings her to the front ranks of non-fiction writers as well. Ellis isn't able to write in any other way, and I suspect that he's fine with that limit, although he does wish to expand the few notes he can play into major orchestrations.

He admires Joan Didion, which is swell, but the reason he doesn't write like her is due to his awareness that cannot do what she is able do with her characters in her supremely crafted deadpan style. There is a humanity lurking around behind the eyes of her men and women ( Didion , among her other many virtues, makes you believe in interior lives among her characters that were formerly vital, but are now vitiated), battered, shattered, horribly damaged with consumption, violence, money and drugs, but there are personalities, beautifully realized, imperfectly trying to make do in a world they no longer have faith in. This is a large part of what makes Didion compelling and worth the effort.

She is interested in what people are doing to themselves as they try to change the world, a curiosity that brings her to the front ranks of non-fiction writers as well. Ellis isn't able to write in any other way, and I suspect that he's fine with that limit, although he does wish to expand the few notes he can play into major orchestrations. His longer books like Glamorama don't expand the style, refine the ideas he's already written. His writing is an Americanization of moldy existential poses.

The compression of crime fiction would have helped him turn his short comings into assets--he would've been in good company with the likes of George Pelicanos and Dennis Lehain--but it's too late for that, I suppose. Ellis will continue to bleat through his rusty trumpet. Ellis has very few pieces of music he knows how to play, which leaves him with some depressing choices when he strives to create yet again: play them louder, longer, faster, and after that, play them slower, softer, briefer. It is all the same stuff with hardly new idea or insight, matters we look for if we continue to read the same authors over time. We've seen a growth in Ellis as a writer, but it's tumorous rather than artistic. A writer's work ought to develop, as opposed to metastasizing