it's memoir and then it's suburban horror and it's cinematic but it's doing things you could ONLY do in a novel and it's ambitious but i think he pulled it off because it took me almost an hr to figure how to review this.....

Disturbed.

I chose this for book group (after being a member for several years, finally I get to choose a decent read. Fellow book group members will know I stay far away from Irish writers and anything cute.)

This threw a spanner in the works, as planned, with one snooty one in particular, refusing to read it.

Her loss.

It was quite disturbing but I liked and that's all that mattered.

His most self-indulgent book to date. The beginning chapters are perfect because it's somewhat autobiographical until it's not. The novel went from reality to fiction and that's where it felt flat.

This was a life changing sort of read. There is an underlying theme to this book which is... 'take time out to appreciate the people you love the most'. So cliche - but this is the strong concept I grasped from this book.
This was so well written by a deranged madman of an author that I am dying to get to know more about. I plan to read every last one of his books.
This is like a train wreck of a memoir, slowly metamorphing into a sci fi horrific fascinating story. It is pretty dramatic and heartwrenching at times though it has some witty humor. Kept me on the edge of my seat. At the end of the book I had to sit and marinate for a long time to grasp WTF just happened... and it was truly life changing. :)

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?

‘The quote I ultimately devised was glib and evasive, a string of words so nonspecific that they could have applied to just about anything: “I don’t think I’ve probably come upon a work so resolutely about itself in years.”’
p 67

"Lunar Park" isn't your average read.

Bret Easton Ellis writes himself into a horror novel as a suburban dad, and there’s also a murderous Furby. I mean, you either want to read that or you don’t; there isn’t really any inbetween.

I say that, but I actually went into this knowing/remembering nothing but that it was horror, which was enough for me to be intrigued. Especially as it starts off innocuously, seeming like a kind of semi-autobiographical account of the author’s life with a few details altered, and I couldn’t imagine how it was going to manage the switch in genres. Turns out, this switch is handled superbly, better than I could have hoped. The story as a whole is absolutely nothing like I expected. It’s quite funny at times, but it’s not flippant. It does such strange and brilliant things with material that would sound insubstantial and possibly terrible if I tried to outline it here. The impression I’m left with is of being trapped in a nightmare in this sprawling suburban house, a setting that appears to have imprinted itself on me: I can recall it in vivid detail; I feel like I’ve seen it.

I only chose to read this (and the less impressive Less Than Zero) as prep for The Shards, but I’m so glad I did. I could easily never have read it – the length seemed daunting, the themes fuzzy – and the thought of that makes me shudder a bit, because it’s so much the kind of book I’m constantly looking for! Now, it feels like one of those stories that lives in a part of me, will always be with me.

TinyLetter | Linktree

El escritor americano Bret Easton Ellis (Los Angeles, 1964) publica 'Lunar Park', en donde el autor americano arremete contra su propia biografía. Una mezcla de realidad y ficción, donde se confunde la vorágine de la vida de autodestrucción de un autor de éxito que reconduce a la vida familiar, con una serie de asesinatos y desapariciones en una atmósfera fantasmal.

Lunar Park es una buena novela de terror, recomendable incluso para lectores que no sientan particular interés por las andanzas personales del autor de American Psycho. De hecho es mucho más agradable leer la novela sin preguntarse todo el tiempo qué partes son reales y cuáles inventadas, simplemente disfrutando de la historia y los personajes.

El problema es que en seguida nos tropezamos con el fantasma de Patrick Bateman, y para todos los que hemos leído American Psycho se trata de un reencuentro irresistible, un poderoso atractivo que amenaza con fagocitar todo el interés de la novela.

A través de la metáfora de los monstruos, las casas encantadas y los fantasmas del pasado, Lunar Park habla sobre la relación de padres e hijos. El propio Ellis ha confesado que su deseo de escribir una novela de terror pura (él siempre consideró American Psycho una comedia oscura) proviene de su admiración por Stephen King, y es inevitable establecer un par de conexiones con la obra del autor de Maine: El Resplandor también abordaba el conflicto de padres e hijos, con fantasmas y casas encantadas; y por otra parte, La Mitad Oscura contaba la historia de un autor que tenía que enfrentarse con un asesino de su propia creación (en aquel caso era un alter ego, un pseudónimo encarnado).

Pero en conclusión, Bret Easton Ellis es un autor con personalidad y recursos, una voz propia que merece ser escuchada también cuando se adentra por terrenos que no le son tan naturales como en el caso del terror de Lunar Park.

Finished my re-read of this. I'm still going to call this my favorite BEE book, with Glamorama as a close second.

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.

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