Bret’s girlfriend, Debbie, is “a kind of slutty teen boy fantasy,” but his fantasies run more toward Thom and their classmate Ryan than they do to her. These friends include Thom and Susan, “casually beautiful, all-American” and “the most popular people not only in our class but in the overall Buckley student body.” Thom is the star athlete, Susan “the prototype of the cool SoCal girl” who wears Wayfarers to class. He and his friends are the beautiful people at the private high school from which Ellis really graduated. It’s meta- if not exactly autofiction, a recapitulation of the author’s history through an imagined lens. The novel opens with an ominous confession: “The last time I thought about this book, this particular dream, and telling this version of the story-the one you’re reading now, the one you just began-was almost twenty years ago, when I thought I could handle revealing what happened to me and a few of my friends at the beginning of our senior year at Buckley, in 1981.”Įllis, or Bret, is both the narrator and the central character of The Shards.

There is nothing infinitely soothing in these pages rather, The Shards is a compulsive exercise in escalating dread and paranoia broken by moments of shocking violence and explicit sex. The tension between the shimmering illusion of luxury, affluence, and privilege-empire, Ellis would call it-and the potential for evil, for real darkness, that underpins our world pulses through the book. Reading The Shards, the dark and disturbing new novel by Bret Easton Ellis, it occurred to me that the hole across the street could just as easily be a mass grave. Is there anything more emblematic of the Southern California lifestyle? David Hockney, in his paintings, celebrated the color, the light, and the sexual yearning embodied by the private pool, and Joan Didion wrote that “a pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.”

I watched as the hole grew and a dark shape formed in the grass. My neighbors across the street were putting in a swimming pool.

American psycho less than zero