#Brett Easton Ellis

[classichorrorblog]

American Psycho (2000)

[literary-illuminati]

Main takeaways of American Psycho so far

the constant use of slurs and visceral disgust for, well, everyone but especially anyone even slightly gay and/or nonwhite absolutely fits the character but does make how often more modern works kind of censor/softpedal their villains (even the ones whose bigotry is, like, their defining characteristic) stand out a lot more.

The running gag of how all the super expensive meals sound just disgusting when you actually think about them for a second is great.

the fact that Bateman absolutely idolizes and implicitly trusts the opinions of Donald Trump in all things has became hilariously more on the nose since publication.

[deadpanwalking]

[vinnystaysawake]

"I simply am not there"

[bearsbeetstextposts]

Truly, I think Homelander is a perfect modern-day successor to the character of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Both are psychopath murderers, whose privilege and power in society makes them basically unstoppable. The horror of watching them brutally torture and kill their victims is amplified by the fact that there’s literally nothing those people could do to escape: law enforcement is useless, police can’t overpower them and probably wouldn’t even try, anyway. But whereas Patrick Bateman’s motives are left unclear (he’s a psycho? he just enjoys doing that? he’s bored?), the audience of The Boys gets to see the very realistic and probable reasons why Homelander acts the way he does. He’s traumatized. He wants revenge on the people who wronged him at a time when he, himself, was powerless. This makes him a more sympathetic figure than Bateman, and it’s been fascinating to see Homelander get the same, He’s-Literally-Me, sigma male treatment online as Bateman’s been getting for years, especially since the creators of both of these characters originally intended for them to represent what they saw as the greatest ills of contemporary American society—capitalism and classism, racism, and homophobia.

[mothhmannn]

hai Paul <3

[highwayragdoll]

I hate this book and movie but the edgy tumblr girls might like this pic. My pic don’t repost

[opsena]

[dougielombax]

I see.

Very impressive.

Now let’s see Ea-Nasir’s credit card.

[int3rnztstar]

when the narrator isn’t all there >>>

[nerdby]

Downloaded TikTok and took a stroll through booktok only to realize today's teens do not get satire. Which, to be fair, I didn't really either until someone explained that the movie American Psycho and is making fun of the intelligent psychopath trope used in horror movies. So like lemme just say if you guys are reading the splatterpunk novel Playground by Aron Beauregard and are wondering what the fuck is wrong this author?

Nothing is wrong with them. The book is satire about pearlclutching helicopter parents -- think Moms For Liberty -- who are making things like swingsets disappear from playgrounds. Which is bad cause rather than your kid getting a scrapped knee it means they're gonna end up spending more time indoors cause there's NOTHING to do outside. This is especially bad for kids in low income neighborhoods who can't afford Wifi or video games.

Especially since these hate groups (Moms For Liberty) are also behind the book bans.

So that's the point of the book, and if you're wondering how you can possibly keep your kid safe on the playground without caving to thinly veiled white supremacist soccor moms maybe

Try PUTTING DOWN YOUR PHONE and GOING TO THE PARK WITH THEM so you can watch them and make sure they don't get hurt. And don't forget the first-aid kit.

Crazy idea, I know.

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 70 – American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis

I’m honestly not sure I ever would have gotten around to reading this on my own, but ended up buying it through the ‘blind date with a book’ thing a bookstore in New York was doing when I was visiting (incredible gimmick, for the record). The fact that it then took me a solid three months to actually finish probably tells you something about how genuinely difficult a read I found it. Not in the sense of being bad, but just legitimately difficult to stomach at points. Overall I’d call it a real triumph of literature.

Not that anyone doesn’t already know, but; the book is spent inside the head of Patrick Bateman, high-flying wall street trader and Harvard blueblood at the close of the Reagan era. Also a serial killer. The story is told as a series of more or less disconnected vignettes, jumping from dinner conversations at one exclusive bar or club or another to the brutal torture and murder of a sex worker to several pages of incredibly vapid pontification on Nina Simone’s discography. The story vaguely tracks Bateman growing ever-more alienated and out of control as the year goes on, but there’s very much not any real single narrative or cathartic climax here. - most stuff just happens (stuff that’s either incredibly tedious or utterly nauseating by turns but still just, stuff).

So yeah this is an intensely literary work (obviously), a word I’m here using to mean one that is as much about the form and style of the writing as about the actual events portrayed. Bateman is a monster, but more than that he’s just an utterly boring and tedious husk of a man, traits which are exaggerated to the point of being fascinating– if you told this story in conventional third person narration without all the weird asides, it would be a) like half as long and b) totally worthless. The tonal whiplash of going from an incredibly visceral depiction of Bateman cutting out the eyes of a homeless man to six (utterly insipid) pages on the merits of The Doors is the selling point here (well actually I think Ellis goes back to that specific well probably one time too many, but in general I mean).

Bateman is a tedious, unstable monster, but as far as the book has an obvious thesis it’s that he differs from the rest of his social milieu only in degree. A symptom of a fundamentally rotten society, not a heroic devil among sheep. The book’s climax, such as it is, involved Bateman getting into a drug-fueled gunfight with the NYPD, shooting multiple people in the middle of the street, and then stumbling home and leaving a rambling confession to every crime on his lawyer’s answering machine – but despite very clearly wanting and trying to get caught and face some sort of consequence or justice, people just refuse to believe that someone like him is capable of anything like that. (It’s not, it must be said, an especially subtle book).

There is, as far as I can recall, not a single character who gets enough screentime to give an idea of their personality who I’d call likeable. Sympathetic, sure, but that’s mostly because it’s pretty much impossible not to sympathize with someone getting horrifically tortured and torn apart (at one point a starving rat is involved). The upper crust of New York yuppie-dom is portrayed as shallow and vapid, casually bigoted towards quite literally everyone who isn’t identical to them, status-obsessed to the point of only being able to understand the world as a collection of markers of class and coolness, and totally incapable of real human connection. Bateman is a monster not because of any freak abnormality, but just because he takes all of that a few steps further than his coworkers.

The book is totally serious and straight-faced in its presentation, and absolutely never acknowledges any of the running gags that are kept up through it. Which shows impressive restraint, and also means that none of them exactly have a payoff or a punchline – it’s just a feature of the world that all the expensive meals at trendy restaurants everyone competes for tables at sound disgusting when you think about them for a moment, or that the whole class of wall street trader guy are so entirely interchangeable that ostensible close friends and coworkers constantly mistake each other for other traders and no one particularly cares. Or – and I’m taking this on faith because fuck knows I’ve got no idea what any of the brands people are wearing are – that the ruinously expensive outfits everyone spends so very much time and money on for every engagement all clash comically if you actually looked up what the different pieces looked like. The book’s in no way really a comedy, so the jokes sit a bit oddly, but they’re still overall pretty funny, at least to me.

I like to think I have something of a strong stomach for unpleasant material in books, but this was the first work of fiction that I had genuine trouble reading for content reasons in I can’t even remember. I’m not sure it’s exactly right to call the violence pornographic in a general sense, but as far as American Psycho goes the register and tone Bateman uses to describe fucking a woman and torturing her to death are basically identical (and told in similarly explicit detail), and all of Bateman’s sexual fantasies are more or less explicitly just porn scenes he wants to recreate, so. Regardless, the result’s pretty alienating in both cases – his internal monologue never really feels anything but detached and almost bored as he relays what he does, sound exactly as vapid and alienated as when he is carefully listing the exact brands and designers every person he ever interacts with is wearing at all times, or arguing over dinner reservations for hours on end with his friends and lovers (though both those terms probably deserve heavy airquotes around them). He legitimately sounds considerably more engaged when talking about arguing over sartorial etiquette. It all adds up to a really strong alienating effect.

Anyways, speaking of sex and violence – perhaps because my main exposure to the story before this was tumblr making memes out of scenes from the movie, but I was pretty shocked by just how explicitly awful Patrick is ‘on screen’. The horrible murder, sure, but also just the casual and frequent use of racist and homophobic slurs, the pathological misogyny, the total breakdown he has at the idea of a gay man being attracted to him and thinking he might reciprocate – all of these are entirely in character for an asshole Wall Street ‘80s Guy even if he wasn’t a serial killer, but it’s still oddly shocking at first to see it so thoroughly represented on the page. It makes how comparatively soft-pedaled the bigotry and just, awfulness, of villains in a lot of more modern books stand out a lot more, I suppose? I have read a lot of books that are in some sense About queerness and/or racism in the last year, and no one in any of them holds a candle to good old Patrick Bateman.

Part of that is just the book being so intensely of its time, I suppose. The New York of this book is very much one of the late ‘80s, incredible wealth living side by side with social rot and decay, crippling poverty everywhere and a society that has to a great degree just stopped caring. Absolutely none of which Bateman or any of his peers care one bit about, of course – they’re too busy showing off the latest walkmans and record players, going to the newest clubs, and just generally enjoying all the fruits of Reagan’s America. Recent history has made the fact that Bateman’s personal idol is Donald Trump almost too on the nose to be interesting, but in 1991 I’m sure it was a bit more subtle in how telling it was.

Anyway, yeah, horrifying and exhausting read, triumph of literature, my god did Easton Ellis hate America (this is a compliment). Now time to go watch the movie!

[brokehorrorfan]

Mondo will release an American Psycho poster by Leslie Herman tomorrow, June 22, at 12pm EST. Shipping in September, the 18x24 screen print is limited to 190 and costs $55.

[vinnystaysawake]

"Pumpkin, you're dating an asshole."

[izimbracreenshots]

Less than Zero by Marek Kanievska, 1987

[andrew3garfield]

tagged by @jcusack thank uuuuu 💞 to share 9 of my favorite books. this was soooooo hard ngl mainly because i have so many favourite books. i chose the ones on top of my head that marked and changed me!!

tagging - no pressure only if you want :)))<3 - @ashstfu @harlecann @mandy-lane @kenobion @amazingpetey @migurin