Bret Easton Ellis Explains Himself

Thoughts on 'Lunar Park'

Bret Easton Ellis occupies a strange position in the literary world in that he exists both inside and outside the mainstream. To be sure Ellis has achieved success; he published his first novel Less Than Zero at just 21, when he was still a student at Bennington College. Another novel followed shortly, The Rules of Attraction. Both works were met with distinctly mixed reviews as Ellis’s flat writing style, shallow characters and his books’ nihilistic outlook was confused as condonement when in fact it was condemnation.

It was with his third novel however, American Psycho, that Ellis faced true controversy. The book, which follows Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street banker-cum-serial killer, had a troubled history. The book was originally meant to be published by Simon & Schuster but after protests from feminist groups such as the National Organization of Women due to the book’s extreme violence and alleged misogyny, publication was cancelled and Ellis was forced to move to another publisher. The book got scathing reviews – the one positive review of the novel in the Los Angeles Times resulted in a barrage of negative letters to the paper and even a series of death threats to Ellis. Ellis thought it was likely that he would never publish another book again. To this day American Psycho is sold shrink-wrapped in Australia and cannot be sold to those under eighteen.

Despite this though American Psycho became an unlikely hit. Bad publicity is good publicity as they say. The novel is not simply the sexist gore-fest that critics made it out to be (though even if it was that would not be reason enough to ban it). Instead, Ellis uses the character of Patrick Bateman to critique 1980s materialism. Bateman is obsessed with clothes and fashion – he describes everything the characters wear in compulsive detail. He is also obsessed with status, desperately trying to get a reservation at the hip restaurant Dorsia, so that he can impress those around him. Yet the book, in typical Ellis style, is delightfully ambiguous, as it is never clear whether Bateman actually commits the horrible murders that he claims to. He is the ultimate unreliable narrator – crazy enough to torture and kill people but also so crazy that he could be hallucinating the whole thing.

The next decade of Ellis’s work was less dramatic and provocative. In 1994 he published The Informers, a collection of short stories set in Los Angeles written in his earlier minimalist style. Although it was released mainly to fulfill a publishing contract The Informers is a personal favourite of mine, and is perhaps the pinnacle of Ellis’s bleakness and coolness. In 1998, Glamorama was released. Ellis took eight years to write this story, a conspiracy thriller set in the fashion world, thinking it would be his masterpiece. Instead, to this day it has failed to break even for the publisher. Ellis took the maximalist, hyper-detailed prose style of American Psycho and tried to marry it with a more conventional plot (making Glamorama his first work that wasn’t ‘plotless’). Unfortunately, the final result did not connect with readers. However, despite this, Ellis’s place in the culture was cemented with the release of the film version of American Psycho starring Christian Bale which has become somewhat of a classic. Ellis claims that he’ll forever be known as ‘the guy who wrote American Psycho’ and that he is okay with that. It is by no means a bad legacy, Patrick Bateman is truly an enduring fictional character, but there is more to Ellis than just Bateman, as his 2005 book Lunar Park, shows.

Lunar Park begins with the sentence: ‘You do an awfully good impression of yourself.’ In the following paragraphs Ellis gives us the opening sentences of his previous novels, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and Glamorama, and compares and critiques them. This sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Lunar Park is memoir, or more precisely, a mock memoir. In the first chapter of the book Ellis introduces the main character of Lunar Park, a successful writer named Bret Easton Ellis. He gives us a little bit of background. Bret Easton Ellis hit it big with his first novel, written when he was still in college. Literary fame followed, as did a general celebrity lifestyle full of drugs and partying. Then Ellis wrote American Psycho to which there was a massive backlash. Glamorama followed after that, as well as long grueling book tour during which Ellis slowly had a nervous breakdown. ‘Cleveland; writer slept until three p.m., missing all morning and lunch interviews; was then found “pigging out on junk food” until compelled to “throw up.” Also witnessed standing in front of hotel mirror sobbing “I’m getting so old.”’ reads an email sent by Ellis’s PR manager. Following the disastrous book tour Ellis decides to sober up and quit his addiction (mainly cocaine and heroin). He signs a contract to write a new book and marries Jayne Dennis, an actress with whom he had a brief relationship and fathered a child called Robbie with during the 1980s. After recounting this history, we find Ellis and his family living out the American Dream in suburbia. His previous life has vanished, and he is now a committed family man.

This first chapter gives us an idea of the metafictional nature of the novel. In reality, Ellis never married Jayne Dennis, she does not exist. He also does not have any children, and the book tour for Glamorama was never as chaotic as he describes. What Ellis the writer is doing with Ellis the character becomes clearer throughout the novel. The first half of the book is mostly a suburban family drama. It is very funny at points, as Ellis struggles to live the life of a family man. He hosts a Halloween party where he does drugs with fellow writer Jay McInerney. He teaches writing at a university where the students are besotted with his celebrity. He tries to connect with his son but fails. Over time however, strange things start to happen to Ellis. His daughter (in fact she is his step-daughter) owns a mysterious bird doll that appears to be alive. There is also a student that dresses up as Patrick Bateman for the Halloween party that creeps Ellis out. Finally he starts getting strange messages from the bank where his father’s ashes are being held in a safety deposit box. The messages are sent at 2.40am, which is coincidently his father’s time of death.

By the book’s second half these mysterious coincidences start to become all too real. Lunar Park then, usually for Ellis’s writing descends into the supernatural and becomes a horror novel and an homage to Stephen King. It becomes clear that the house that Ellis (the character) and his family live in is haunted, though Jayne doesn’t really believe it. The haunting is multi-faceted. Ellis is metaphorically haunted by the ghost of his father. He sees himself repeating the same mistakes that his father did during his own interactions with his son Robbie. Bret is haunted because he can’t escape the shadow of his dad. He is also haunted by his own work. Characters from Ellis’s novels pop up here and there. This is not unusual as Ellis’s writing occurs in a shared universe – characters from Less Than Zero appear briefly in The Informers for example – but Lunar Park takes it to extreme. Patrick Bateman is alive in novel and is committing murders, killing people with the same names as his victims in American Psycho. The final haunting is material. Bret’s step-daughter’s doll called a Terby really does come alive and attacks the family dog in a scene that gives the book a burst of the typical Bret Easton Ellis hyperviolence, that was missing from Lunar Park. There is also another mysterious monster that attacks the house which we later find out is from a story that the young Ellis wrote when he was a child.

Lunar Park differs from Ellis’s other works in several ways. Firstly, it is his first book to have a multi-dimensional main character. Ellis’s other narrators were marked by their vapidness and blankness, here the Ellis character is complex and difficult and capable of self-reflection and deep thought. The book is also his first and only work to feature supernatural elements, yet at the same time it fits perfectly into the existing world with the supernatural horror adding to the general horror present in his other work. Finally, Lunar Park is his most metafictional work, and the start of a phase of work that could be defined by its postmodern nature. In January 2023 Ellis released The Shards a re-telling of his teenage years in 1980s Los Angeles. Already serialized on his podcast, The Shards sees Ellis explore much of the same meta-fictional territory as Lunar Park though from a different angle. Both books examine what it means to be a writer, and the effect that has on other people. And both books looks at Ellis’s self-mythology, the image that he has projected of himself, that in some ways is just as important as his works. Lunar Park is definitely a novel worth reading – even if it is not your usual thing – though it is certainly improved by possessing a familiarity with Ellis’s writing, it can stand alone as a creepy ghost story, a suburban family comedy, and a touching reflection on the relationship between fathers and sons.

This article originally appeared in Interkom magazine.