Ellis writes a semi-autobiographical fictional horror story for the most part taking place manly within in a short span of months complete with a made up wife and family. Prior novels play into the mainframe of the novel, especially _American Psycho_.
A lot of scares, creeps, mysteries, and swerves and nothing I was expecting going into this book, but satisfying enough.

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 picked this novel up because it heavily inspired Porcupine Tree’s record Fear of a Blank Planet, a concept album about a terminally bored, alienated youth from a broken home, lost to prescription pills and computer screens. Some of the lyrics were even directly lifted from the novel. That’s all the context I had going in… and Lunar Park couldn’t have been further from what I had expected it to be.

“A good impression of myself
Not much to conceal
I’m saying nothing, but I’m saying nothing with feel
I simply am not here”
— Anesthetize, Porcupine Tree (from Fear of a Blank Planet, 2007)

I started reading it on my commute, and about thirty minutes in, I thought to myself “this has got to be the longest introduction I’ve ever read, and no end to it in sight”—but it turns out that it was Chapter One. Lunar Park is a mock memoir, Bret Easton Ellis is its main character, and I was completely sideswiped by this realization. The beginning of the novel covers his early and sudden rise to international fame as part of the literary brat pack, detailing his rampant drug use, sex escapades, and humiliating book tours—parodic and inflated, but reasonably accurate. Everything dissolves into fiction when Ellis begins a relationship with a famous actress with whom he has a child. The early parts of the novel, where the line between autobiography and fiction was only slightly blurred, really messed with my brain in the coolest of way—I love meta fiction, and felt that Ellis really pushed the trope to its boundaries in a transgressive way.

n  “This is what a writer does: His life is a maelstrom of lying. Embellishment is his focal point. This is what we do to please others. This is what we do in order to flee ourselves. A writer’s physical life is basically one of stasis, and to combat this constraint, an opposite world and other self have to be constructed daily.”n

He gets a chance to try and make amends, and as he attempts to leave his decade of decadence behind and become a father to his son Robby, the novel is simultaneously several different things: a) a satire of how the super rich parent their children by medicating them to the point of them being virtually blank slates (which is clearly the theme Steven Wilson picked up on for Fear of a Blank Planet); b) a drama about the relationships between fathers and sons; c) a viciously hateful self-portrait of the author, which circles back time and time again to why he wrote the violently misogynistic American Psycho.

The latter was what I wanted more of. I was fascinated by this narcissistic, detached, and rather deranged experiment of a novel that blends reality, memoir, and fantasy. It was weird as hell, but it felt like it had substance, and something to say. I would’ve loved him to explore the relationship between his (fictionalized) life and what led to the writing of his most controversial novel American Psycho more; turn Lunar Park into a sort of Cliff Notes on cocaine.

n  “You dream a book, and sometimes the dream comes true. When you give up life for fiction you become a character.”n

Instead, Bret’s fictional world begins to cross over into his “real” one in a much more literal way, as brutal murders which seem to follow the pattern of those carried out by American Psycho protagonist Patrick Bateman start happening around him, and the narrative then further morphs into something that would be right at home in a Stephen King novel. I love King, but this is not where I wanted this novel to be headed, and that’s where it lost me—at the homicidal children’s toy come to life, the double haunting, and the gratuitous suggestion, very late into the book, that Robby, Bret’s son, is actually, for some reason, at the epicenter of all the weird happenings. If there was a deeper meaning there, I didn’t get it.

I really enjoyed Lunar Park up until that point, when it unraveled just a little bit too much for my taste—but I will give him that it was never once dull. Even though it wasn’t what I had expected (neither when I started off, nor when I approached the finish line), this was a really fascinating if not totally successful experiment with some moving parts about love, loss, and family. I don’t have to like the end result in order to respect a ballsy author who follows no literary conventions at all, and does whatever the hell he wants instead. Based on what I know about Bret Easton Ellis, maybe this is actually precisely the novel I should have expected.

Ok jag vet inte vad jag hade väntat mig men inte det här. Så många lager! Älskade!