4.0 Stars
This was such an unsettling piece of horror. I really enjoyed the meta aspect to this story that blurred the line between fiction and fact. The protagonist is one of the most unlikable characters I have ever read. This is clearly done on purpose, but be aware if that's an issue for you. I recommend reading American Psycho before this one, but it's more a companion novel than a straight up sequel. Overall I really enjoyed this one and I would strongly recommend it.

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!

A friend of mine who works for a magazine in New York told me they asked Bret Easton Ellis if he wanted to write for this magazine, and if so, what would he like to do? "DVD Reviews." No hesitation on his part.

I read a short remembrance of Tom Cruise in the late 80's by Bret a while back in Rolling Stone - it was really good. He writes well for magazines. The high and salient points come quickly and clearly. The man does not fiddle-faddle.

I recognized that same tabloid style in Lunar Park, which is a suburban gothic horror story. The author is playing himself here, and he is beset variously by alcoholism, drugs, a murder in the next county, his own literary history, his tranquilized and sullen adopted son, an equally sullen dog, the ghost of his father, and a monstrous and changing house.

It's hard to say, many months after I've read this, how it all resolves or fits together, but I can tell you that the book reads quickly, is frequently funny, grotesque, horrifying, and never deep, and it will definitely not make you feel good about yourself. Or the author.

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...

This was mesmerizing and completely unexpected from Bret Easton Ellis.

Lunar Park is an introspective, autofictional (or is it metafictional?) analysis of one's own career and place within culture as well as a self-exorcism of the ghost of one's abusive father. It's both moving, quite entertaining and extremely conceptual and confusing at times. I believe it's the only time (except for White) where Ellis has been 100% earnest in one of his books. One of the back blurbs described Lunar Park as John Cheever writing The Shining and I couldn't put it better myself, really. It's a privileged, suburban horror drama and it's oddly beautiful?

I believe this is one of my favorite Bret Easton Ellis novels. Perhaps even my favorite. It has been criminally underdiscussed over the years because (I think) it has really terrible cover art. Full review on Dead End Follies next week.

this diva

Wow, actually really not very good.

First off I'm feeling a bit baited-and-switched. I should have done my homework, but the edition I picked up and browsed in the English-language section of a Copenhagen bookstore gave every indication of being some kind of sincere memoir. The first twenty or so pages of this book seemed to be exactly that, and I had just gotten really curious about Ellis' life, but in Copenhagen a cup of coffee costs ten dollars so I don't even want to know what Lunar Park sells for.

But then, later on in my trip, I realized I could just e-purchase the e-book version on my Epple ePad for less than the price of a cup of coffee. Thanks, future! So I did that, and on a train from Copenhagen to Siegen I dug in ...

... and realized that no, this book I just bought isn't the story of Bret Easton Ellis' life, this is some squished-together combination of a James T. Frey-style false fantasy memoir and a really poor Steven King impersonation.

Ellis' signature detachedness really fucks him up here, because as he (eventually) undertakes a ghost story, crossed with a demon story crossed with some other scary story -- there are three (3) different diabolical evils that show up in his life at the same time, and it's never really explained how they'r related -- and as the author Ellis describes the character Ellis groping through a trademark drug haze to come to grips with the threat to his trademark overfunded and mood-stabilized family, and as he's sitting there describing stuff that's supposed to be scary, it's not once the least bit frightening. Really it's kind of awkward watching it fall so flat.

There are some good bits. The tribe of the western rich that Ellis followed through school and into banking has here grown older and began to raise families, while the fictional Ellis is trying to "start over" by marrying his old girlfriend and masquerading as a yuppie parent. The (ostensible) author Ellis describes exquisitely the weirdness of what privileged people and their children call "normal" these days. His observations on that level have always been brilliant.

But then there's a whole lot of suck. For the whole final third he's just trying, trying, trying to build a sense of dread, foreboding, uncertainty ... all those things that good horror writers know how to do. And he's failing, failing, failing. He likes to telegraph little telling factoids (chilling factoids!) to foreshadow the upcoming misc horrors, but he refuses to be subtle -- he keeps backing up and explaining exactly why the factoids are so chilling.

Sometimes authors write not knowing what happens next, and the not knowing infects the writing with a tension and mystery. But this is a case of someone stringing together a lot of scary horror story scenes that don't quite link up, and then trying to bury that mess under another mess of more and more mystery and strangeness, hoping all along that there's an ending in there somewhere, but the final revelations are pretty mild and pointless: your estranged dad is haunting you! But really he's just trying to warn you that you're trapped in a badly plotted book.

I know Bret Easton Ellis can write much better books than this. This seems like a weekend meth project. "I know! I'll write a Stephen King novel ... about me!" Maybe he's low on drug money. It certainly seems written for Hollywood. I don't doubt he's already sold the film rights, and if that film gets made Ellis will have one more meta-notch in his meta-belt. But frankly this book is a disappointment. I give him credit for trying something different, but when writers get so big that they can push their mistakes past their editors, through their publishers and onto the public, it's time to move on.

Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park does not deviate from his previous controversial works. The novel explores the subject matter that has made him famous: drug abuse, debauchery, and paranoia. Ellis writes very fluid and engaging prose that makes it hard to ignore his talent as a novelist. But he chases topics and material that are overly disturbing at times. He certainly has a dark vision of humanity, where people are lost, neurotic, and inebriated.

In Lunar Park, he dares to fictionalize himself, and he does so very successfully. The Ellis character in the novel is by no means an exact replica of Ellis the writer. But the novel’s character mesmerizes and fascinates even in all his bad behavior. Ellis the writer provides an exceptional portrayal of the clinical development of paranoia that the Ellis character experiences. Unlike Ellis’s other works, a stronger sense of morality and compassion squeezes through among all the perversion. As a father, the Ellis character tries to do good for his son, but his addictions cripple his abilities. He battles the ghost of his own father as much as his rampant addictions. The novel charts the madness of the past infiltrating the present, and on that level the book succeeds.

It seems like at least 40% of the book is about how you just can't trust Bret Easton Ellis. The horrific story of an untrustworthy narrator is a good trick if you can pull it off, but I'm not feeling like Lunar Park pulls it off as Will Self's My Idea of Fun, Jim Thompson's After Dark My Sweet, or The Usual Suspects. Though the book is creepy in places, I never found it scary. Though the book is intended to be a parody of suburban life, I do not find that part of the book compelling, funny, or particularly pointed. The use of brand names pushed me into anachronism fact check territory, which I did not enjoy. There were interesting story elements here. They did not come together for me. I did really want to like this. But I just didn't. I only read about 60% of this before I got really really sick of hearing about fictional Bret Easton Ellis.

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.

only a deranged person could write something like this, and i respect that

I read several reviews of this book before reading, most of which denounced it as being awful and I have to say, I'm surprised.

I tore through it in 3 days. I saw it as a near brilliant bit of mind f*ckery, so many psychological themes and commentary on modern life for me to gleefully go searching on Google to tear up and figure out. All that and horror, too! (I read somewhere that he was influenced by Steven King, in writing this one. Indeed. I have to say, I like the Ellis version of King even better.)

I don't necessarily agree with those that say Ellis clearly hates himself. He might. Or he might also just have had an idea for a book like this and is a brilliant writer with a ... very "interesting", shall we say, mind.

But I go back to the commentary on modern life. Having recently become a member of the suburban parent crowd, I had a great time reading his descriptions of the very sort of parents & parenting style I'm avoiding. There was one quote, in particular, that I loved: "What happened to just wanting your kids to be content and cool?... These parents were scientists and were no longer raising their kids instinctually - everyone had read a book or watched a video or skimmed the Net to figure out what to do."

I also found it incredibly clever to write a novel based on, or rather heavily referencing, your previous novels, in this way. I'm one of those people who, after watching movies (sometimes before), likes to tear the plot apart and understanding the meaning, where it all came from. In some ways, this felt like a very trippy readers guide to American Psycho. It's Cliff Notes on steroids. American Psycho just became that much more interesting to me and I plan on going back to not only read it again but watch the movie again, as well, given this new insight.

Yes, I'm a little confused and unsure of some parts - I've come to expect that from Ellis. But I like a book (or movie) that has me researching and discussing with other readers, trying to figure it all out. To me, the books that deserve bad reviews are those that I've forgotten the moment I close the cover and put it down.

I can see how this is definitely not a book for everyone. For me, there were many of my favorite elements. There were several passages that had me thinking, "I really wish they'd make a movie out of this," just for the visuals. (I'm a big fan of psychological horror with lots of blood and gore. Dare I say this almost falls in line with the J-Horror genre?)