- Paperback: 399 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Books (11 Sep 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0679735771
- ISBN-13: 978-0679735779
- Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 2.3 x 20.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (137 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 951,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
American Psycho
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk 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.
Product Description
Now a major motion picture from Lion's Gate Films starring Christian Bale (Metroland), Chloe Sevigny (The Last Days of Disco), Jared Leto (My So Called Life), and Reese Witherspoon (Cruel Intentions), and directed by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol).
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
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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
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Ignore these reviews, read the book and make up your own mind! This book is so cleverly written that you will need to come back to it time and again to get the most out of it. Yes, the violence is deeply disturbing and horrific but the author, in my opinion, means us to be horrified by it. Yes, the fashion comments get boring, but this is a reflection of the character's obsessive behaviour brought about through drug addiction, not to mention the whole social satire of the fashion conscious 80's. And, of course, what everyone has so far neglected to mention, is the question of whether or not the main character actually committed the crimes in question or whether they were the drug fuelled fantasies of a sick mind! Ultimately I was left feeling pity for a character who in no way deserved it. The main character ends up being not only a product of his time but all that was wrong and evil about his time, nevertheless I cannot help but see him as a helpless victim swept up on a wave of commercialsm and hype of all that a rich successful young man ought to be. This expectation fuelled by drugs makes him the screwed up kind of yuppie you might expect but 1000 times worse. The graphic descriptions of poverty and violence merely serve to shock the reader out of the apathy that they, along with everyone one else, has succombed to in their everyday reading of newspapers and watching T.V, violence is not just described in this book it is glorified and it takes this to shock us in a world where violence is accepted as the norm! Well done Bret Easton Ellis for a book which is not only a very good read but which challenges the reader on a number of issues and moral standpoints. I defy any person who has read this book not to look at the world around them more closely, a novel which truly opens ones eyes to the society in which we live.
28 of 30 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").
This theme continues through Glamorama and into the wonderful short story collection The Informers, to the point where a father does not even recognise whether a figure through a window is his son, his son's boyfriend, or any one of a million such "boys".
Better evidence for Bateman's violence being as imaginary as his success is the mythical/movie-like escape from imminent police capture. This echoes Bateman's addiction to cheap action movies and cable TV shows, and shows his narcissism and self-aggrandisement in equal measure.
This is a great book, one of the true greats. That is why it is loved and hated so ferociously. And as a reviewer says above, if a book is so dark it forces you to feel repulsed or even look away, it has achieved a state very little art still can in our desensitised times. Power like that is very hard to achieve in print.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Only very few people will be gripped by this book in the same way as other comparable novels (Fight Club springs to mind with its similar satirical twinges, and with it being on the side of my screen), mainly due to the often monotonous tone of the lengthy passages reffering to all manner of trivial thoughts running through the protaganists mind. Many of the previous reviews complained about this, calling it boring, and an over-used technique. They are, of course, wrong, and I, of course, am right. These repetitive monologues are the defining force in hammering down Bateman's shallow, and often confused persona, as well as satirising the eighties yuppie perfectly - creating a character that believes he knows what good taste is, believes it to be incredibly important to have it, thinks he has it, thinks that other people thinks that he has it, and yet is misleading himself completely, and in doing so, tells the reader exactly how superficial (sp?) people in situations similar to Bateman's were. Unfortunately, despite being, in my humble opinion, a classic of modern fiction in telling a truly tragic tale in a unique manner, in doing so the book has become a very daunting prospect. The first time I read it, the first few hundred pages bored me completely, and only the murders actually held my attention particularly well. However, coming back to it with a will to really take the book in (btw watching the film Wall Street before hand is a help in understanding the true nature of Bateman and the eighties) helped me to appreciate it more fully. I can't say that I understand the book completely even now, unlike some of the others I am not convinced with the wholly fantastical ending, or even the true relevance of Patrick's relationship with Evelyn. A previous reviewer said that he read it while on the train. I do not recommend this. Sit down in a quiet room and focus all your attention on the book (cliched maybe, but you'll apprectiate it). It may well suck you right in.
Some find the content of this book amazing, some disgusting. I say it is both, but the literary panache will take some beating. An excellent book.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
one of my favourite narratives
I watched the film first. (i know, i'm an idiot blah blah blah...)
whatever, the book itself is very well written, whilst the persona is built up extremely well with often... Read more
whatever, the book itself is very well written, whilst the persona is built up extremely well with often... Read more
Published 18 days ago by Toby Smith
American Physco
American Physco is almost indescribable, a portrait of a world of pure excess in which the people seem to all be caricatures of each other, all sclupted from the one GQ cloth. Read more
Published 28 days ago by Pacific
Unpleasant but completely necessary
First things first: this is an unpleasant book and it would be a tough to say whether the explicit violence is more objectionable than the explicit and pornographic descriptions of... Read more
Published 1 month ago by C.L.Brown
Are you what you wear?
I've coincidentally been reviewing books with Psycho in the title recently (cf my review of THE PSYCHOPATH TEST by Jon Ronson). Read more
Published 3 months ago by Jeremy Parnaby
Hmmm.
After a good friend recommended this book and hearing exceptional reviews, I picked it up expecting a really good read. I was, however, rather disappointed. Read more
Published 3 months ago by S. Austin
A Book with a Clever Hidden Message...
I bought this book as a spur-of-the-moment type thing. I had never read anything by Brett Easton Ellis before but I read from reviews that this book was quite a transgressional... Read more
Published 4 months ago by BlahBlahBlah
Gross and over-hyped. Glad to have read it though
Frequently, in our age of the shock factor, a book will come along where its reputation not only precedes it, but it proves to be far more entertaining than the actual literature... Read more
Published 6 months ago by MadameAddams
There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed...
This book led me to question what the purpose of a review was. Should I base my review on whether or not I enjoyed the book or how successfully the book realised the author's... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Callum
I wish I'd never read it
I have never written a review for a novel before, but after reading this I had to warn other people. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Rebecca
The blackest of black comedies...
I started this book with some trepidation given that I knew it contains a lot of extremely graphic sex and violence. What I hadn't expected was to find the book so very funny. Read more
Published 7 months ago by FictionFan
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