Patrick Bateman is Harvard-educated and intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom - doing impermissible things to women. He is living his own "American Dream".
American Psycho
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Amazon Review
Brett Easton Ellis established a reputation as the enfant terrible of American fiction in the 1980s with his controversial novel Less than Zero, but with the publication of American Psycho he became established as one of the most notorious and reviled novelists currently writing. American Psycho deserves its controversy. The novel opens with a sign scrawled above a New York subway station: "Abandon hope all ye who enter". So begins a hellish descent into the world of Patrick Bateman, the novel's protagonist. Bateman is a handsome 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie, who spends his days listening to Whitney Houston and working out which exclusive restaurant to eat in and what clothes to wear in a dizzying parody of 1980s consumerism run mad.
However, Bateman also has a darker side; he is a psychopathic serial killer, with a penchant for torturing and sexually abusing young women before killing them in the most gruesome and explicit fashion. The novel contains little actual plot, and consists of extended descriptions of exclusive restaurants, designer clothes, TV shows and the minutiae of Bateman's vacuous world, relieved only by clinically described scenes of torture and mutilation which are not for the faint-hearted. Bateman makes little attempt to justify his actions, merely claiming that "this is the way the world--my world--moves". As a satire on the bankrupt, money-driven world of the 1980s, American Psycho is a successful, if rather heavy-handed piece of fiction, whose controversy seems only set to increase. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Review
A seminal book. --Fay Weldon
Serious, clever and shatteringly effective. --The Sunday Times --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
Serious, clever and shatteringly effective. --The Sunday Times --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
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First Sentence
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Generation X classic which makes Coupland look like a light weight
12 April 2006
By Richard 82
Format:Paperback
Easton-Ellis' first person description of the development of a psychopath is nothing short of mind blowing and this fact alone makes American Psycho a great novel. Following the anti-hero Patrick Bateman through about a year of his life and aided by flashbacks to past events the reader is drawn ever more into the mindset of a killer and his normalisation and disassociation from the acts that he is committing. At the beginning of the book (where violence is only hinted at briefly), it is very easy to laugh at Bateman, his shallow life, appalling friends and fiancé and his assumption that happiness and wealth are one and the same thing. As the story develops one can almost feel pity for someone who is so clearly trapped in a life not of his choosing but which he is unwilling to leave for all the wrong reasons.
Bateman's increasingly violent behaviour and periods of psychosis characterise the middle of the book, but the author still finds room to add his own brand of dark humour to the situations he puts his star into. In the final section of the book we see Bateman develop into a full blown psychopathic monster, completely out of control and unable to repress the primal urges that are overcoming him.
That Easton-Ellis manages to achieve this whilst taking a sideways sneer at eighties yuppie culture AND providing an allegorical interpretation of what it means to be alive in modern day America is what makes this novel remarkable and ultimately an essential read.
My only complaint is that the novel is too long. Did the Huey Lewis and The News chapter really add anything to the plot, particularly after lengthy discussions on Genesis and Whitney Houston?... Read more ›
Bateman's increasingly violent behaviour and periods of psychosis characterise the middle of the book, but the author still finds room to add his own brand of dark humour to the situations he puts his star into. In the final section of the book we see Bateman develop into a full blown psychopathic monster, completely out of control and unable to repress the primal urges that are overcoming him.
That Easton-Ellis manages to achieve this whilst taking a sideways sneer at eighties yuppie culture AND providing an allegorical interpretation of what it means to be alive in modern day America is what makes this novel remarkable and ultimately an essential read.
My only complaint is that the novel is too long. Did the Huey Lewis and The News chapter really add anything to the plot, particularly after lengthy discussions on Genesis and Whitney Houston?... Read more ›
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Well, what can I say about this book? I wouldn't say I was that disturbed by it, in the end, in part because I found the writing quite impenetrable and hard going so that I couldn't really get into the narrative.
It's a clever book; there's no doubt about that. You have to read it really carefully to get it, I think. Does Patrick Bateman commit any of the crimes he describes or does he just fantasise about it? They're pretty horrific scenes so either way, he fits the book's title. There are certainly enough inconsistencies to make you wonder, and I do find that clever. In fact, I find it a clever book all round but I just struggled so much with the delivery.
In essence, I couldn't say I'd truly recommend this book because I didn't find it very readable and, yet, at the same time I can't help thinking it is a modern classic because it did something with the unreliable narrator that hadn't really been done before. Even the major things that I object to in the book, like the constant detailed descriptions of clothes and food that slow everything down, I understand their necessity. Not a book I enjoyed but one that I respect.
It's a clever book; there's no doubt about that. You have to read it really carefully to get it, I think. Does Patrick Bateman commit any of the crimes he describes or does he just fantasise about it? They're pretty horrific scenes so either way, he fits the book's title. There are certainly enough inconsistencies to make you wonder, and I do find that clever. In fact, I find it a clever book all round but I just struggled so much with the delivery.
In essence, I couldn't say I'd truly recommend this book because I didn't find it very readable and, yet, at the same time I can't help thinking it is a modern classic because it did something with the unreliable narrator that hadn't really been done before. Even the major things that I object to in the book, like the constant detailed descriptions of clothes and food that slow everything down, I understand their necessity. Not a book I enjoyed but one that I respect.
37 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I think it is a common and understandable mistake to assert that Patrick Bateman does not "actually" kill in the book, and to cite as evidence for this the fact that no one is reported missing after their deaths, and that people Patrick has supposedly killed are spotted at parties, etc.
In fact, this evidence is misleading. To take American Psycho as part of a major arc of fiction by Ellis, we see that in ALL of his books there are cases of identity-confusion, or in fact the total loss of individual identity altogether.
Even within American Psycho itself, Bateman is often mistaken for other people, and other people mistaken for Bateman or for other other people! This is simply because Ellis is satirising the fact that all 20-something Wall Street wannabe Yuppies in the 80s looked and sounded the same - they all aspired to the Gordon Gecko look (itself an image that started as satire and achieved aspirational iconic status much to its creator, Oliver Stone's, horror).
So when people tell Patrick they have seen his "victims" alive and well at restaurants after their supposed deaths, the suggestion is that they are truly dead, but will never be missed because they were never identifiable or memorable individually anyway. It is a soulless universe where lives are as interchangable as ties or handbags.
As I said, this continues a major theme in Brett Easton Ellis' other novels Less Than Zero and Rules of Attraction, where again people often claim to have seen characters in places we know they have no been because of this identity confusion (in these cases the blond, tanned, slim, muscular, vacant Californian pretty boys are the "clones").
... Read more ›6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
This book is awesome, but I found the beginning hard to get into, mainly because of the excessive (and I really mean excessive) explanation of the characters that our protagonist Patrick Bateman comes into contact with. But after this initial period, the descriptions die down a little, and start to actual get on with the story. I personally really enjoyed the film, and I am ashamed to say that I read this from the strength of the film and a recommendation by a friend. The violence and general grotesque sections to this book will not be to everyone's taste, and to be honest if it is to someone's taste they should probably be put in a mental institute for many years to come. Don't take it too seriously as it is black comedy at perhaps the darkest level imaginable but I thoroughly recommend it.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
American Psycho
Very very boring better than any sleeping tablet, used it every night to make me sleep. Well done to the author for making a load of money from a nothing story. Read more
Published 4 hours ago by J. W. Irvine
3.0 out of 5 stars
Freaky
Do not assume that if you enjoyed the film you will enjoy the book. Although incredibly well written it goes into perhaps too much grotesque detail of the murders. Read more
Published 4 days ago by Essi
5.0 out of 5 stars
Patrick Bateman - a hero for our times
I clearly remember buying this when it was originally realesed back in 1990/91. This is an extremely important novel in my own reading/ literary history, something betrayed by the... Read more
Published 8 days ago by K. K. Jakubczyk
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliantly crafted book - but not for the fainthearted.
I'm sure that most people considering reading this book will already have some basic idea of what it's about, or at least know that it is violent, mainly due to the film. Read more
Published 28 days ago by Serena
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brutal
At times almost tedious with how meticulous the main protagonist is. Often funny but always shocking and brutal. I doubt I could read this again though
Published 1 month ago by Dean Williamson
1.0 out of 5 stars
I hated this book, and would have given zero stars if I could
I'm going to say right from the off with this review that I hated this book, and thought it was total and utter rubbish. Read more
Published 1 month ago by R. A. Davison
3.0 out of 5 stars
Ok...
Suffers from the author's ignorance about the real nature of psychopathy, which the author seems to think is just an extreme form of narcissism. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Minerval
3.0 out of 5 stars
Nice book with some scenes particularly well-written
Don't judge a book by its film. In my view the book is much better although the writing gets very repetitive and you just end up skipping boring parts of the book such as... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Ilya Kondrashov
5.0 out of 5 stars
Timeless and amazing
One of my favorite books by far. My friends thought it was way too gory and creepy at times, skipping chapters, but I found it to be exceptionally interesting and captivating. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Deanshotgun
4.0 out of 5 stars
A compelling read
As, I suppose with many, I read this after watching the film to see how they differ. I much prefered the book over the film, as I find is often the case. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Lorna
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