The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

The Shards Reviews

• 
  Meike

  This utterly absorbing pseudo-autofictional variation on
  Less Than Zero with thriller and un-true crime elements as well as an abundance of sex scenes reads like an over-the-top historical novel about the 80's - it's an eccentric pageturner and great, smart fun! Our protagonist and narrator is one Bret Ellis, a man who penned bestsellers like, you know,
  American Psycho. The fictional Ellis looks back at the year 1981 and the events that made him who he is: We learn about a psychopathic killer called the Trawler and an over-the-top cult who haunt Los Angeles, and they come for 17-year-old Bret and his friends who are seniors at the elite
  Buckley School - needless to say, real-life Ellis also graduated from Buckley.
  
  In the novel, we meet the classic protagonists of every American high school drama: The simple-minded jock (Thom) and his prom queen girlfriend (Susan) - Bret is in love with both of them -, the spoiled rich friend of said prom queen (Debbie) who is Bret's girlfriend, the joint-smoking outsider (Matt) with whom Bret has sex, plus the hot mysterious guy (Ryan) with whom Bret also has sex (it's 1981, and people are not supposed to know about Bret being gay due to the stigmatization). The whole thing has a dark, sinister air: Most of the characters seem to know that they are playing roles, that this life of riches and parties is a charade, and of course there are tons of drugs, alcohol and sex to numb the pain. Enter Robert, the hot new guy (another stock high school drama character): Bret mistrusts him and, based on some possible hints, sets out on the quest to prove that he is indeed the Trawler, so a serial-killing maniac, all the while writing on a little novel called, you guessed it,
  Less Than Zero, about a bunch of disaffected high schoolers (ha! And did I mention that LTZ protagonist Clay has a poster of Elvis Costello on his wall, much like fictional Bret?).
  
  With the arrival of enigmatic Robert and the sudden death of Bret's secret lover Matt, heightened paranoia begins to disrupt the relations between the characters: Inspired by Susan's dispassionate demeanor ("numbness as ecstasy"), Bret has long started to build up a wall of alienation, but now this gets fueled by his fear of the Trawler and his investigations into Robert's intentions - Bret becomes, as he says, "the tangible participant". He takes more and more drugs and becomes more and more unreliable - the fact that he is an aspiring writer known for his wild imagination also doesn't make him more trustworthy (this is a particularly wicked variation on the Künstlerroman). Another major factor dulling his perceptions is his constant teenage horniness: Even Robert might be terrifying, but he also turns him on. The novel is full of detailed sex scenes, as well as gruesome crime scene portrayals.
  
  To the sound of 80's music, watching classic 80's films and wearing hip popper clothes from the decade, Bret and his friends seem determined to fit in the general Hollywood panorama, to hold on to appearances that give them safety, which, as every Ellis novel tells us, is an ultimately futile endeavor. What makes "The Shards" so unbelievably fun is how self-conscious, how meta the text is: Ellis invents his own origin myth, he claims to tell us why he took on his persona and how he garnered his reputation by serving us a tale of un-true crime that treats the 80's as a historical decade - which, of course, they are, but it's just so sovereign how Ellis laughs about the datedness of what first made him zeitgeisty. The American Empire of the 80's, it's long gone, and this author knows it.
  
  Ellis remains a writer who refuses to be fully explained, to be placed and categorized - and he proves it with a novel that remixes his former work while turning the idea of autobiographical explanations into a travesty (see also Kracht's
  Eurotrash and Greene's
  Travels with My Aunt). Ellis indulges in shifting the portrayal of his fictional "Bret" character into someone untrustworthy and glamorously sinister, and I'm all here for the drama and the cheeky role play. With 700+ pages, this text could still be longer, because it is so enjoyable and, much like a series, opens a narrative space that invites readers to linger. I'd love to see this as a movie or a series - although a true-to-the-novel rendition would clearly be R-rated! :-)
  
  Here's the Spotify playlist with all songs mentioned in the book:
  https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2pE...
  
  (Side note: Swiss Ellis fan and German-language literary superstar
  Christian Kracht recently published a novel about an author called Christian Kracht that also refers to his own debut novel,
  Faserland, and that also mocks the idea of an explanatory, autobiographical origin story - and Kracht's novel is called
  Eurotrash, a term mentioned six times in Ellis'
  American Psycho! WEIRD, and I love this crossover.)
• 
  luce (tired and a little on edge)

  bret: i've connected the two dots
  
  me: you din't connect shit
  
  disclaimer: i did not like this book and my review reflects of that. if you loved this book or if you are a diehard ellis fan, skip this review, don't @ me telling me i’m wrong for disagreeing with you or that everything that i didn't like was intentional. you are right, i didn't get it. still, i was able to form opinions and impressions that i will express in the entirely subjective (i am not in fact stating ‘irrefutable facts’) review below.
  
  This book had no business being this long. Sure, the first 100 pages or so were intriguing but i was bored by Bret's endless navel-gazing, horniness, and flexing (we get it, you have a gucci backpack and you lift weights) and the constant inane fighting with his 'cohort', which usually follows this formula:
  -what are you suggesting?
  b. what do you think i am suggesting?
  -i think you are suggesting something.
  b. why would you think that i was suggesting something?
  -i just do
  b. why would you say that?
  -say what?
  b. that i was suggesting something
  - because you are.
  b. i think robert is a FuCkiNG fREaK.
  
  Banal, polemical, self-indulgent, misogynistic, sensationalist, verbose, and frankly, just all over the place.
  
  Ellis is an edgelord who brought to mind those wannabe auteurs like Sam Levinson whose work is desperately trying way too hard to be transgressive and brilliant. Sure, sometimes you can bring to the table both flash and substance, but sometimes, like in the case of The Shards, your attempts at flashiness are so forced, so ostentatious, so desperate, that you end up stripping your work of any actual substance. At times it seemed that this book was trying to be something like TSH, other times it adopts a true crime quality, but ultimately, it only succeeds in being truly cringe.
  I can think of so many works that succeed in exploring obsession, enmity, alienation, and repressed desire, in a way that The Shards just fails to. Titles like Apartment by Teddy Wayne, These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever, New People by Danzy Senna, Old School by Tobias Wolff, Night Film by Marisha Pessl. There are several films (of dubious quality) that present us with two delusional boys playing mind games, doing something ‘bad’ together, and you are not sure who is lying or who has the upper hand or if they want to kill or fuck each other such as Like Minds, Murder by Numbers, and Super Dark Times, that would probably succeed in being less dull than The Shards.
  
  
  Before this review devolves into what is likely to be a spoiler-y cathartic rant, I will give you the gist of things:
  this is a 700-tome of a book that oozes self-importance but beyond giving us detailed descriptions of everything worn by his peers (i could google ‘what did vanilla rich white teens wear in 1981/82’), providing us with every single street name he drives on (with as much passion as a sat nav), and using the same repetitive imagery and language to describe the bodies of the men around him (we get it, you are a horny teenager), it has nothing to say. Bret’s alienation and emptiness are established in the very first chapters, the rest of the novel doesn’t really elaborate on his malaise further. The true crime angle...it comes across as subpar true crime podcast that wants (but fails) to be something like Zodiac or I'll Be Gone in the Dark There.
  I genuinely thought that Ellis’ would have more to say about evil and the nature of evil, about darker instincts, violence, obsession, delusions, normalcy, queerness, about privilege. But it doesn’t. Sure, he succeeds in capturing the essence of a place and moment in time, but he often loses sight of the big picture, so that beyond presenting us with a generic group of rich white American kids whose successful parents are divorced/separated and emotionally distant (i can hear that *violin*), spend their time by the pool, partying, drinking and snorting coke, and the guys’ (whose personalities are variations of the bro/dude/chad figure) exchange puerile wisecracks all the while blissfully unaware of just how privileged an existence they have.
  Despite Bret thinking that the story he is recounting is the most shocking story of all time, it was boring, shallow, and stupid even. There, I have said it. I usually don’t stoop to the level of calling a book I didn’t like stupid but The Shards was stupid. Once we passed the 30% mark, I no longer felt affected by the trying-too-hard-to-be suspenseful atmosphere, and neither Bret’s insufferable internal monologue nor his interactions with the obnoxious people around him challenged or inspired me. This book has nothing really to say, and in some ways (maybe i should have heeded the red flag that was ellis dedication “for no one”, is fitting).
  
  There is a long introduction that I did not read with close attention, as it was a lot of waffling and Ellis discussing how beneath his “prince-of-darkness literary persona” there is “an amiable mess, maybe even likable” (sure) and this story which has haunted him for years, and although he planned on writing it, for the longest time, he was unable to. The gist is that the events in The Shards supposedly happened. Still, The Shards is marketed as a work of fiction, so I decided to approach it as such. But, if pressed, in the case that the events in The Shards are truly drawn from Ellis’ own personal real-life experiences, here is what I think: that's questionable. Sure, in some vague capacity, they may have happened but there is a lot of stuff that is...not so credible. Maybe this is due to Ellis’ unrelenting over-dramatizing and his edgy self-fashioning, maybe due to how inane and unlikely certain exchanges between him and his friends were (in that they often seemed either scripted or hollow, like the type of conversations you have come across in media about american high schools), or maybe due him constantly going on about how at that point in time he wasn’t aware of the true narrative of things, in a way that tries to be suspenseful, makes you question who is playing who, but Ellis is so heavy-handed and repetitive in his foreshadowing that it really ends up being counterproductive.
  I have read enough mystery novels and a lot of academia-adjacent novels where we follow a clique of friends but someone is a bad egg and someone is cheating on someone else and someone is maybe gay etc., that can’t say that I found the scenes focusing on Bret’s ‘friends’ petty discussions or in-group fighting to be particularly riveting. Especially when Bret tries to tell us that the people in his clique are actually friends, and that he even loves Thom and Susan. Thom, Bret establishes early on, is drop-dead gorgeous and like almost every other young man he is friends with he is invisible compared to a greek statue, and we are reminded time and again that they all are tanned, blond, muscular, and so on. Now, Thom, we are told, has the personality of a golden retriever. And that’s pretty much it. I often forgot about his existence and the generic lines he gives gave me some strong NPC vibes. This is fitting in a way since Bret has a serious case of main character syndrome and occasionally says shit with some very strong red pill vibes. There are the girls, Susan and Debbie, who predictably fall into the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. Susan doesn’t have a personality as such, beyond being beautiful. Time and again, Bret will remind us that she is something else, Not Like Other Girls. Yet, she very much sounds like other girls. She has the most generic personality, her most distinguishing trait is that of being the object of desire of Thom and of Robert. Then there is Bret’s girlfriend…where to begin. The way Bret behaves towards her is disgusting. And I’m not even talking about what happens later on in the novel but from early on. His distaste for her person and her body, his completely denying her a mind, feelings, personality, depth, and so on, was dehumanizing. Bret’s misogyny proves that yes, sometimes, misogynists do come in shapes that are different from your good ol’ standard cis straight man mold. From the careless way, he calls her slutty, to the way he suggests that the way she comports herself is solely to gain male attention, to him being neglectful and dismissive of her, to his feeling more sympathy for Thom (whose parents have divorced) than Debbie (her mother is an alcoholic, and her ‘closeted’ father makes passes to her male friends). The sex scenes with her were a mix of grim (ragazza, file a restraining order) and turgid (of course, making this 'slutty' girl orgasm is easy for bret). Then there are the two boys Bret has flings with, one is the dopey stoner, Matt, and the other one is this Ryan guy who is very much the epitome of the bro. But of course, the true centerpiece in the novel is Robert, the new guy.
  Now for the first 100 pages, like I said, I feel almost hypnotized by the fevered quality of Bret’s recollections. In the opening pages time and again Bret says ‘I remember’, and the rhythm created by this repetition is mesmeric. These idyllic last days of summer brim with the promise of youth, yet, these are tainted by Bret’s ominous foreshadowing, as he refers to the danger to come, and that things will never be as they once were between him and his friends. Bret is suspicious of this new guy from the moment he learns about his existence, finding it strange that he would transfer for his senior year and that he was able to get into their exclusive school. We become aware that Bret believes he is playing pretend, a role even, and that once the school year is over he will be able to make a fresh start in college. The night before the first day of school, he happens to see someone sneaking around the school. The morning after, he learns that whoever snuck into the school likely was responsible for a perverse ‘prank’. Bret meets Robert, the new guy, who is nice enough, until Bret realizes that he saw Robert months earlier during a screening of The Shining. He brings this up but Robert denies that it was him. Bret keeps insisting in a way that is guaranteed to give second-hand embarrassment (that’s basically how he behaves throughout the novel). Bret tries to paint Robert as a sinister figure, hinting that on that first day, he was already lying to them about ‘stuff’. And by stuff, I mean that before enrolling in this school, he was in a psychiatric facility. Bret, who learns from Susan about this, decides that this proves that the guy is a freak. Bret convinces himself that Robert was responsible for the prank, based on him denying he was at the cinema + not telling Bret's clique that he was in a psychiatric facility (and why would he? the guy literally just met these people so not opening up about this doesn’t seem weird; after all, when bret learns about this he becomes hysterical, proving that robert was right in not disclosing his personal life story to them). Additionally, Bret seems to forget that he too is a liar. Anyway, Bret begins stalking Robert from the get-go and is scandalized that Robert catches him and isn’t happy with it (pretty sure bret calls robert a lunatic…which pot kettle mate). Every time he spends time with his bland group of friends Bret makes his outlandish feelings for and suspicions of Robert known and is frustrated that no one feels like he does. There are so many ridiculous scenes where an agitated Bret is about to have a hernia over Robert being a freak or responsible for ‘terrible’ things. Every-time Bret accuses Robert of this (to his face, to his friends, to adults) he is so apoplectic and hysterical it seemed weird that the people around him could move on from the frankly unhinged shit Bret just said.
  Bret’s paranoia is exacerbated by the sight of Robert and Matt (the guy he sleeps with) talking, and when something is up with Matt, Bret decides that Robert is responsible.
  Much of the narrative is about Bret either salivating over Robert or going on and on about what a ‘freak’ he is, often painting him as some sort of a ‘psycho’ mastermind. I swear, there were times when Bret is fixated on using a certain type of imagery when interacting with Robert, one that hints at Robert’s having several ‘faces’, that made The Shards come across as a third-rate Death Note. Bret’s morbid delusions are repetitive and seem to stem from him being attracted to and jealous of Robert, and being impressively ignorant about mental health (which is weird given that he paints himself as being intelligent and astute, a reader and film enthusiast…wouldn’t he have read sylvia plath? watched one flew over the cuckoo's nest?).
  
  There are a lot of interactions that are about nothing. But not even in a realistic mumblecore way, these backwards and forwards were generic and often unconvincing. These conversations are meant to come across as intriguing, possibly hinting at the clique’s shifting allegiances and dynamics, but they succeed in only being bland and as insightful as a puddle. Bret’s friendship with these people is so shallow, that I didn’t ever feel particularly troubled by the supposed in-group tensions and petty fights. I understand that you might romanticize or come to mythologise certain aspects of your childhood or in this case your teenage years (which according to hollywood are everything), but then, make us care too. But no, we have to have these preposterous backwards and forwards that go nowhere and achieve nothing. Turns out that Thom and Susan tell Robert that Bret doesn’t like him, Bret is angry at first but this never goes anywhere (do i even care though?). Bret keeps wanting to get involved in the love triangle between Thom, Susan, and Robert not so much because he actually cares and is worried about Susan, but because he believes that Thom “didn’t deserve this” and he wants to keep his clique as is. Bret is so noisy and sanctimonious about Susan’s love life, often demanding to know how she feels about Thom and/or Robert. His distaste for Susan and Robert’s behavior is rich coming from the guy who eventually becomes involved with his gf’s father. But Bret is quite venomous when it comes to Susan and Debbie being taken by Robert, which again, is quite hypocritical given that he spends way too much time fantasizing about Robert’s body.
  
  Eventually bad shit does happen and Bret is convinced that Robert is responsible. Not only because of him being a ‘freak’ and a ‘liar’ but at the party, Robert starts making obscene comments about what he would do to Susan. Rather than dissuading Susan from becoming involved with him by telling her what Robert said, whenever he speaks ill of Robert in front of others he just keeps going on about the same shit in a way that comes across as unfounded, irrational, and prejudiced, so no one, surprise surprise, takes him seriously. He even confronted Robert himself a couple of times, but these moments were far from suspenseful. The book wants you to think that it's this psychosexual cat-and-mouse game with a nihilistic vibe (in bret’s words: “numbness-as-a-feeling aesthetic”) but it all felt puerile, affected, and lacking any nuance whatsoever.
  
  Funnily enough, I haven’t even spoken about the whole serial killer/cult/true crime aspect of the story. There is this killer on the loose, girls disappear, houses are being broken into, and pets disappear. All of this troubles Bret, but not the people around him. Time and again he believes someone else is in the house with him or that he is being watched and so on. He soon enough becomes convinced that it is Robert. Based on what…? His earlier (mis)conceptions and delusions and paranoia? I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting Bret the misogynist to care about the victims or wonder about their lives, their fears and desires, but I did think that he would question the motives of this killer, think about what drives or compels someone to enact such violence and depravity (nurture? nature?) but he doesn’t. Robert is a ‘certified’ freak. That’s that.
  
  The story being set in LA also means that we get a ton of pages blabbering on celebrities, influential people, and the state of the entertainment industry in the 70s and 80s. The men in these rarefied spaces are granted semblances of personalities, and Bret even feels some degree of pity/empathy towards the ones he sees as old, washed-up, and pathetic. But…the women are not. This brings us back to Bret’s misogyny. Not only he doesn’t consider them as complex a being as man, but the way he talks about women left me with the impression that he did not attribute any sort of complexity or depth or intelligence, be it emotional or analytical, to them. Like many people who are way too obsessed with serial killers, he doesn’t give a shit about his victims (or at least, his female victims), he doesn’t think that someone like Debbie could experience anything meaningfully, he also views Susan as beautiful, and not much else, and sees her an object (either “unattainable” or be possessed by his bff thom), and all of the women over 30 are neurotic alcoholics.
  I found Bret to be an arrogant, hypocritical, edgelord whose navel-gazing (seghe mentali) is by no means as shocking, subversive, or intelligent as it wants to be. You know how (often) other's people dreams are just boring? Even when they are convinced of their dreams specialness? And they insist on recounting them to you even when you make it clear you are not that interested? That’s how I felt listening to Bret's interior and exterior blathering.
  
  I had the feeling that Ellis was trying hard to use certain motifs, but he does so inconsistently. But what really annoyed me was just how often Ellis felt the need to stoop to polemical asides, that try to make fun of younger generations for being pc, ‘sensitive’, and simplistic in their understanding of human nature (labeling people/things as good/bad)...in a way that, to use, as Ellis would say, the ‘parlance’ of today, is cringe. Mate, it’s embarrassing. Stop. We get it. Back then students could whistle at Susan and that was okay, she LIKED it even. Back then, a grown-ass man could proposition an underaged person, with the tacit and/or spoken understanding that in exchange for sexual favors they will be able to advance their career or something along those lines, without being labeled a predator. Boo-hoo. Bret even whines about when he thinks that someone like Thom would be called “in today’s parlance, a white privileged male, a king of the system”. Imagine that. How sad.
  
  review continues in comment section
• 
  Michelle

  Bret Easton Ellis, most famous for his books American Psycho and Less than Zero, has penned a wicked tale, one that is at once bewildering, terrifying, and completely absorbing.
  
  "We were teenagers distracted by sex and pop music, movies and celebrity, lust and ephemera and our own neutral innocence."
  
  We go back to the days when Bret himself was a senior at the private Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, CA. The year is 1981. He and his uber wealthy friends plan to spend their final year in high school under the haze of alcohol, cocaine, quaaludes, and anything else they can get their greedy little hands on. Kids with "a what-the-fuck entitlement" as they are described in the book. The year starts off well enough until a new kid, Robert Mallory, joins the mix. Bret is curious as to why someone would transfer from Chicago to LA in their final year in high school. He immediately gets bad vibes from Robert yet his friends are all welcoming him into their elite group.
  
  Meanwhile, in the background of this story is The Trawler, a serial killer that is targeting, torturing, and killing young women. Bret gets obsessed with the story yet no one else seems to be paying attention. Certainly none of his friends are interested. Maybe it's the writer in him but he begins to build a time line of the murders and they all coincide with Robert Mallory coming and going from LA. Is it possible that Robert is The Trawler?
  
  This book is a hard book to describe. It seems semi-autobiographical but it really is a work of fiction. I hit up Google many times while reading this to try and figure out what is real and what isn't. The Trawler was a serial killer in LA in 1981 but he targeted elderly women. Bret took that story and spun it to fit the narrative of this book and it was super successful. I was creeped out and chilled to the bone on several occasions. Having said that please be warned that this book is not for the faint of heart. The descriptions of the murders for some will be beyond disturbing and nightmare inducing. As a reader you will also have to endure all sorts of debauchery. If teens getting high and having sex is a no no for you then move right along. I would describe this book as hypersexual. There is a lot of male/male sex, some male/female sex, and a whole lot of masturbation. I've mentioned before that I don't need to know all the nitty gritty details of sex in my books but it does work here because there is absolutely nothing erotic about it. It sets the tone and atmosphere of not only the place but the time being 1981 when homosexuality was still firmly in the closet.
  
  What is stopping me from giving this book 5 stars is the length. This book is over 600 pages long and incredibly dense. There is a lot of text on the page so you can't just fly through this. This book demands that you take your time. I personally think an editor could trim this down and make this book a masterpiece. For example there is a lot of driving around the LA area:
  
  I took Avenue of the Stars and would make a left onto Santa Monica and then drive South Beverly Glen until it hit Bel Air Road where I would swing a right onto Bellagio, which would take us to Stone Canyon.
  
  I was on the freeway and realized in a daze that I was flying through the Cahuenga Pass when I saw the Hollywood Cross lit above the Ford Ampitheatre and I found myself racing across the 101 passing through Burbank and Studio City and then Sherman Oaks and Encino and Tarzana, until I was out in Woodland Hills, where I drove through the now empty parking lot of the Promenade.
  
  Now for someone from the area this may be really cool but for someone like myself on the East coast all these driving scenes got a little tedious because I wasn't able to visualize them at all. Maybe I should have pulled up a Google map of the area but, come on, who really wants to put that much work into reading a book.
  
  So yeah, my only complaint is some editing because this book is sensational otherwise. A+ for the cover art as well. 4 stars!
  
  TW: ALL OF THEM
  
  Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for my complimentary copy.
• 
  NPC

  Yet another fragment of coolly ironic metafiction from Bret Easton Ellis. The setting is new, the characters are somewhat younger, but everything else about this novel will be very familiar to readers of Ellis's work. At more than 600 pages, I couldn't help wondering what the point was. He has performed all these tricks before -- the gratuitous clinical depravity, the quirky blending of autobiography and fiction, the ultra-dry satire. What was fresh and provocative in the 90s now seems formulaic. It also doesn't help that in "The Shards" Ellis occasionally lapses into saccharine nostalgia for 1980s Los Angeles and his own adolescence. Overall, this is not a bad novel, but it reeks of self-indulgence.
• 
  Kelly (and the Book Boar)

  Did I just read this nearly 750 page book in two days? Tell me you’re crazy without telling me you’re crazy. In my defense, I didn’t realize how long this was before I requested it from the library. I simply saw B.E.E. had a new release and Mitchell said he would hurt me if I didn’t get it immediately. I think I was like a billion and a half down the wait list too, but ended up getting this within a week of asking for it so I think it’s safe to say others either were intimidated by the sheer volume or realized pretty darn quickly this wasn’t for them and returned it. And to whoever you are I say THANK YOU for letting me get my grubby little mitts on it post haste.
  
  Now on to the book. Simply put, this is about . . . .
  
  “the memories I had of the Trawler and more specifically of Robert Mallory.”
  
  Written as a nonfiction narrative, this one is for the Bret Easton Ellis superfan. I mean, if you ever wanted to crawl around inside this fella’s brain, The Shards is the one for you! After finishing I did a Google to see what was said about this “true story” before it was released and I am amazed at how many people were duped. Dear Dummies: YOU LITERALLY HAVE A COMPUTER ATTACHED TO YOUR HAND ALMOST ALL THE TIME. It’s not hard to find out these cases didn’t actually happen. Not to mention he is an author who previously wrote a “true story” about fucking vampires. And also . . .
  
  I was a storyteller and I liked decorating an otherwise mundane incident that maybe contained one or two facts that made it initially interesting to be retold in the first place but not really, but adding a detail or two that elevated the story into something legitimately interesting to the listener and gave it humor or surprise or shock, and this came naturally to me. These weren’t lies exactly – I just preferred the exaggerated version.
  
  I just found out this was initially released as a serial story – new entries were written every two weeks and read by Ellis himself on his podcast. My first reaction to that? Oh yeah, I would have read the crap out of this as a serial. Followed immediately by, ewwwww, B.E.E. even YOU have a podcast?
  
  
  
  
  With that knowledge now is the time to disclose that while I’m the first to say “don’t you have an editor?!?!?!?!” – on this occasion I’m giving a pass – because there literally was no editor nor any intention that this would be released as a physical book when it was initially created.
  
  But I wasn’t kidding when I said this is for the superfan. Basically it reads like a high school journal written by someone with extreme literary chops and covers Bret Easton Ellis��� senior year at Buckley in 1981. Ellis more than dabbles in sex (both of the hetero and nonhetero varieties) and drugs, works on his debut novel Less Than Zero, finds himself a member of the “me too” movement nearly 40 years prior to its time and develops a bit of an obsession with the new boy in school who he believes might just be a serial killer. Oh, and also? It is QUINTESSENTIALLY 1980s. We’re talking popped collars, Topsiders, ray bans and a detailing of every single song that was playing at any moment throughout his days. It certainly is not a book for everyone, but it was most definitely for me. All the Stars.
  
  Whistling tunes we hide in the dunes by the seaside . . . .
• 
  Emmanuel Kostakis

  3.75* rounded-up. Not sure what prompted me to buy this book… I was never a big fan of BEE; his transgressive novels didn’t quite resonate with me (my vote goes to JG Ballard); but then again this was some time ago (almost 20 years!), so I said lets give it another go.
  
  Familiar themes: L.A. setting in the 1980s > loss of innocence & alienation > over-privileged, spoiled, entitled rich kids playing hardball (or they think so) > boring days and hedonistic nights full of sex, drugs and rock & roll (all in excess – with plethora of “explicit” content)…and a serial killer.
  
  Nothing new or provocative that haven’t been said; no seismic revelations; transgressive enough to remind me the same old BEE with similar form, structure and narrative as his previous novels (Less than Zero & American Psycho spliced together). Saying that, somehow I ve enjoyed The Shards more! It seemed that this autofictional, “self-trolling” melodrama’s main purpose was some short of “release” from the angst of the moment. It oozed a kind of melancholic dreamy aura, a longing that reverberated throughout; and in the end deliverance!
  
  Sustain the illusion till finally be free…
  
  Give it a try…
  
  *Some better editing would have definitely helped the narrative.
  
  **Multiple references of 80’s songs played a significant role in the novel: e.g. Icehouse (by Icehouse): Now is colder every day. There is no love inside the icehouse: “ I remember the power of the song had the first time we played it in Susan’s car as we drove across the Sunset Boulevard and through Beverly Hills and the vocals were yearning for something better than what the lyrics offered and the chorus was about dreams, about hope, which were intensified by the doomy romanticism of the overall track itself.”
• 
  Dennis

  I hope this is a sign to come because THE SHARDS is my first read of 2023 and I absolutely loved it. I feel embarrassed admitting this, but I’ve never read anything by Bret Easton Ellis before. My husband is always telling me about his works and how much he enjoys his novels, so I figured it best to start with his latest novel and work my way back. After hearing that @gareindeedreads loved it, I decided to go for it!
  
  THE SHARDS is a dark metafiction novel that will continue to psychologically mess me up even after reading. I’m literally trying to figure it out now. The story involves a group of best friends at the Buckley School in Los Angeles during the 1980s. Our protagonist, Bret details his teenage years with this tight-knit group—money, drugs, parties, sex—this group lived a very intense life at a formidable time during their lives. Their lives, however, are forever changed when a serial killer begins claiming victims that are hitting close to home and it just so happens to line up with the arrival of a new student joining their senior class. This book starts off relatively slowly, but the subject matter gripped me from the moment I started. It’s a long book at around 600 pages, but I caught myself reading it whenever I could.
  
  THE SHARDS is a book about obsession and lots of gay sex—but it’s also a coming of age story, sort of, with powerful messaging. I absolutely loved this book and I really need to talk to fellow readers about this book because I have lots to say! This book will stay with me for a long time.
• 
  Janie

  I devoured Bret Easton Ellis' books when I was much younger. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho and The Informers have been on my "read" shelves for a long time. I began drifting through different genres as years went by, and I recently sampled The Shards and proceeded to read my newly downloaded copy right away. Normally, I shy away from long books. It took me just over two weeks to inhale this 741 paged novel. I am not a fast reader, but I was able to keep up a steady daily pace that took me deeper and deeper into the melodrama, suspense and psychopathy that is this book. Just like years ago, I was entranced, surprised, and shocked by the story's progression. It's a keeper. If you have enjoyed B.E.E.'s work in the past, this book is for you. I am happy to have realized that I still have some more catching up to do.
• 
  Andrew Smith

  The author opens up with a section telling how it’s taken him some forty years to write this book. It is, he says, based on events he witnessed; acts of violence perpetrated on people he knew, friends. He says that he’d tried to write the book years ago but at that time the act of recalling events he’d lived through had freaked him out so much he’d ended up in hospital, suffering from the mother of all panic attacks. When he was a high school senior, at seventeen years of age, a new boy had arrived at his school and joined his friendship group. This boy, it was later revealed, had had a difficult past and though on the face of it he seemed to be fully adjusted, he was actually anything but. He was to become a prowler, a killer and he was to badly hurt at least one of Bret’s close friends.
  
  Bret Easton Ellis attended The Buckley School in Los Angeles, an establishment available to the rich and pampered. At the time of the events he covers here his parents were away on a long trip abroad, so he’d been left at home for an extended period with the family dog and a maid who prepared his breakfast and cleaned up after him. All his friends similarly lived in grand houses, drove expensive cars and seemed to have free rein to do whatever they wanted. In addition, they all had access to the drugs of their choice. Bret had a girlfriend, Debbie, but in all honesty he wasn’t sure if he preferred guys; he was at that juncture where adolescence is about to make way to adulthood, but he wasn’t quite there – he references this thought a number of times.
  
  Set in 1981, Bret talks a lot about the music he and his friends were listening to, and this fixed the timeframe in my mind too, with British singers such as Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello and Glenn Tilbrook also being amongst my favourites in the early Eighties. Having been transfixed by the opening section I truly believed I was reading a true account of events Bret had lived through, and yet as I came across long conversations which repeated seemingly verbatim and detailed recollections regarding his own thoughts at that time, I concluded that a degree of artistic license was in play. So what was this: a factual account, a piece of fiction or something in between? I couldn’t really work it out. But I didn’t dwell on this too long as either way I was fully invested by now.
  
  It’s a lengthy story - I listened to a 22 hour long audio version, read by the author – but every time I paused I just couldn’t wait to get back to it. I found it to be such a compelling story, and hearing it told through Bret’s voice added something for me. It just felt right. There’s a lot sex and violence here, much of it very graphic. There are other disturbing scenes too, so this one is definitely not for the squeamish or faint-hearted. But there is a richness in the writing and in the narrative that I believe lifts it above all but the very best books. As I approached the end I thought I’d worked it all out, but a surprising and somewhat ambiguous ending cast some doubt on that. It’s definitely one of the most mysterious, addictive and truly impactful books I’ve come across in a very long time.
  
  My sincere thanks to W. F. Howes Ltd for supplying a copy of this audiobook, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.
• 
  OD1_404

  I have mixed feelings about this book. Overall, I didn’t hate it (though at times I thought I did). I was mostly engaged (though I did think it was going to become a DNF at around 300/400 pages), but I ploughed on.
  
  Mainly, it’s far too long. The strength of the plot does not support it’s length. It’s overwhelmingly overwritten. A bit like Ian McEwan’s ‘Lessons’, it just felt like a vanity project for Ellis, wanting to write an epic. His own ‘Secret History’ (which I was also a bit ‘meh’ about.)
  
  And whilst we’re talking about vanity… take a moment to think about Ellis, nearing 60 yrs old, writing himself into a story, as a 17 yr old, who’s having (almost constant) sex with ridiculously hot young guys (we’re talking Bruce Weber models by the sounds of Ellis’ fantasies). Of which we get pretty detailed accounts. So, erm, yeah, ok…
  
  To Ellis’ credit (I think), these aren’t just purely wank fantasies however, as none of them ever amount to anything, and he’s always left, somewhat heartbroken, on the sidelines.
  
  And unfortunately for Ellis (whom I’m sure was hoping it would be) none of it is particularly shocking. Not compared to some of the things I’ve read over the last year. If you were shocked by 50 Shades, probably stay away from this, but I think most other literary adults will be like, ‘And?’
  
  (Except for the fish… if like me, you hate fish, let this be a warning! 🫣)
  
  If you like Ellis, read it. If you’re curious, read it. If you’re unsure, find something else instead you definitely do want to read!
• 
  inciminci

  Ellis kept me guessing until the end, for this long a novel it was surprisingly suspenseful. Personally I was a little frustrated by repetitive and idle dialogues and the amount of teenage drama, but it kept me listening in a fast pace nevertheless. What I really liked where the scary bits, like the parts about the Trawler, or the cassette tape the main character was sent, that was seriously eerie. I usually don't enjoy this genre of meta fiction meets true crime much, so I think I will definitely read other books by the author focusing on more horror.
• 
  Blair

  The Shards is another Bret Easton Ellis novel in which the author includes a warped version of himself as a character: this time, 17-year-old Bret Ellis is a student at Buckley, a prestigious LA prep school, in the 1980s. One can assume many details of the plot, in which Bret parties with his similarly wealthy friends and struggles with his sexuality and episodes of existential dread, are true to life – but the book diverges from reality when it introduces a serial killer, ‘The Trawler’, who seems somehow connected to Bret’s magnetic new classmate Robert Mallory. I understand the story was originally serialised on the author’s podcast, and it bears the hallmarks of that – it rambles on and on, various pieces of information and characterisation are repeated – but the overall effect is somehow hypnotic. There’s some brilliant writing about nostalgia for youth. The reader is completely immersed in this glossy 80s milieu, complete with detailed settings and enough mentions of specific songs to make a lengthy soundtrack playlist if you want. It’s the longest book I’ve read this year, but when I got to the end I still wanted more.
  
  I received an advance review copy of The Shards from the publisher through
  Edelweiss.
  
  
  TinyLetter |
  Linktree
• 
  Flo

  A gayer, more explicit The secret history set in Los Angeles. Bret is one of those rare contemporary authors who aren't afraid to become a character in a serial killer mystery. It had my attention, but it was too long.
• 
  Thomas

  Ich bin mit "The Shards" zurück in eine Welt eingetaucht, die ich vor 36 Jahren das erste Mal kennen gelernt habe. Ich war 17 Jahre alt, als sich für mich durch junge Autoren der US-Popliteratur neue literarische Welten eröffneten. "Unter Null" erschien 1986 erstmals auf deutsch als rororo-Taschenbuch. Im selben Jahr erschien auch das noch bessere "Ein starker Abgang" von Jay McInerney, mit dem zusammen Bret Easton Ellis das Literary Brat Pack anführte. Auch noch in 1986 erschien "Die verlorene Sprache der Kräne" von David Leavitt. 1987 kam das grandiose "Großstadtsklaven" von Tama Janowitz. 1988 erschien der erste Roman von Michael Chabon "Die Geheimnisse von Pittsburgh". 1991 sollte Bret Easton Ellis mit "American Psycho" erneut die literarische Welt erschüttern.
  
  Da das Internet noch nicht im Alltag angekommen war, hat man sich über Musik und Literatur in Zeitschriften informiert. Es gab die "Spex" mit dem Fokus auf Musik. Die Literatur kam aber durchaus auch vor. Mit Texten von Rainald Goetz oder der Möglichkeit im Spex-Shop die englischsprachige "American Psycho"-Ausgabe zu bestellen (via Postkarte). "Tempo" galt als "Lifestyle"-Magazin, war aber viel mehr. Hier gab es auch die junge Literatur. In der "Tempo", die 1986 zum ersten Mal erschien, schrieben Autoren wie Christian Kracht, Maxim Biller oder Uwe Kopf. Andrian Kreye ist ein ehemaliger "Tempo"-Autor, der auf Spotify eine knapp zehnstündige Playlist mit sämtlichen Songs, die in "The Shards" vorkommen, kuratiert hat. Das parallele Hören der Musik und Wiedererkennen vieler Songs hebt den Roman noch einmal auf eine weitere Ebene. In "Tempo" erschien 1992 die Reportage "Less Than Zero" von Kracht. Hier schliesst sich der Kreis zu Bret Easton Ellis und einer Zeit, die ich als unerhört aufregend in Sachen Literatur empfunden habe und miterleben durfte.
  
  Das brillante "The Shards" ("Die Scherben") hat mich über mehr als 700 Seiten zurück in diese Zeit und diese Welt geführt. Es ist aber kein Nostalgie-Trip. Es ist ein Roman, der 1981 spielt. Die vordigitale Zeit, in der Easton Ellis an "Unter Null" arbeitet. Es ist wieder ein Roman über seelenlose, oberflächliche Rich Kids. Neben dem Nihilismus von "Unter Null" gibt es aber diesmal auch Empathie und Reflexion. Dummerweise aber auch einen Serienmörder. Das Buch ist ein Spiel mit simulierter Autofiktion, Gesellschaftsroman und literarischer Thriller in einem. Jede einzelne der 736 Seiten ist aufregend. "The Shards" ist ein Meisterwerk, das bei mir mit seiner elegant gleitenden Sprache und der dadurch entstehenden Atmosphäre, in die dann das Grauen einbricht, Glücksgefühle ausgelöst hat.
  Wertung: 6,25 Sterne
  
• 
  Mike Thorn

  While the milieu is reminiscent of Less Than Zero, The Shards feels overall more proximal to Lunar Park, both novels marked by metatextuality and horror-soaked autofiction. This project also sees Bret Easton Ellis circling many of the same fixations that permeate Smiley Face Killers, the screenplay he wrote for Tim Hunter's woefully underrated, Bressonian slasher.
  
  In its current incarnation, this thing is sprawling, circuitous, sometimes repetitive, but these qualities actually supplement its formal goals: it plays like an authentic outpouring of traumatic memory, chock full of teenage lust and longing, paranoia and regret. It has me rethinking what exactly constitutes a "novel," not only in terms of genre, but also in terms of form (indeed, the episodic podcast delivery is fundamental to the way this narrative works). I'll be curious to see how The Shards looks in edited, written form. As it stands: one of the most exciting and inventive novels to be released so far this young decade.
• 
  Anna Carina S.

  In letzter Zeit neige ich dazu Bücher dafür zu kritisieren, dass sie zu lang sind.
  Ja, das ist auch hier der Fall. Es ist aber schnurz.
  Mein erstes Buch von Bret Easton Ellis und ich weiß nicht wohin mit meiner Begeisterung.
  Von Stephen King pflege ich zu sagen: "Meister des Belanglosen". Damit meine ich, das kein Anderer völlig alltägliche, belanglose Szenen, so einnehmend und unterhaltsam schreiben kann wie er. Daher ist es auch völlig egal wie ausufernd, umfangreich die Bücher werden. Man klebt fest, will weiter, mehr.... Herr Bret Easton Ellis darf sich nun mit auf dem Olymp meiner "Meister des Belanglosen" tummeln.
  Das Buch nimmt einen ganz fiesen Psychothriller Drive an. Dazu einmalig eingefangen: die 80er mit sämtlichen Referenzen und einer Abgestumpftheit der Schönen und Reichen par excellence. Ich habe das Buch als unglaublich nihilistisch empfunden und feiere es für diese dunklen Vibes. Dazu eine nie nachlassende sexuell aufgeladene Parade an schönsten Körpern und Visagen - Liebe es!
• 
  Ken

  I'm a bit shocked that, with over 1,200 reviews, this is still hanging over the 4-star mark. I haven't read Ellis since Less Than Zero, and that's going back four decades, I think. Did I even LIKE that book? It's beginning to come back to me that the answer may be "Not so much."
  
  This one is around 600 pp. and I made it to the halfway mark before saying, "Enough is enough." This has got to be the most undisciplined writing I've plowed through for many, many years. Sure, a lot of novels (esp. of late) tend to be verbose, but they pale compared to this. Of the 300 pp. I read, I think 170 could have gone out the window without a problem. It would have done wonders for the book!
  
  I got as far as I did for one reason and one only: murders. I admit I was curious where this was going, but it worked so studiously at NOT going, that I just lost all patience, saying, "Jesus, Bret. If you can't respect the reader, the reader might not respect you."
  
  And yes, it's true, he makes himself the star character of the narrative. Everyone else is made up. As are an awful lot of scenes with tedious dialogue and repetitive internal monologues.
• 
  Janelle Janson

  #SHEREADSWITHCATS REVIEW
  
  Thank you to the kind people at Knopf for providing me with a free copy.
  
  I have been familiar with Bret Easton Ellis ever since I read AMERICAN PSYCHO way way back. BEE’s writing is always sharp, clever, and oozes with dark humor. So, OF COURSE, I needed to read his upcoming release THE SHARDS as quickly as possible. I mean, it’s his first novel in 13 years!!! I was Patrick-Bateman-excited to receive this copy and so I read.
  
  THE SHARDS is metafiction and just over 600 pages. Bret and his tight knit circle of friends attend a prestigious prep school during 1980s Los Angeles, CA. Sex, drugs, greed, and general debauchery ensue. And like everything with BEE novels, the setting and his choice of era are always a character. This is a dark and disturbing read - THE SHARDS will stay with me for a long long time. Not to mention, there is a serial killer on the loose. Need I say more? Pub 1/17
• 
  Stay Fetters

  "And I just stood there in the fading afternoon light, realizing at seventeen that I was already staring into my past—that the past had a meaning that would always define you."
  
  BEE became one of my favorite authors after I laid my eyes on American Psycho. It bewitched me with its cold hard gaze. I was trapped in its clutches and I never wanted to escape.
  
  Bret with a new murderous book, count me in! The Shards sounded like something that I should have loved. There's a serial killer on the loose and targeting teens in the local area. Things get bloody real quick for Bret and his friends when more people start to disappear. Then a hunky new kid steals all of their hearts. Bret knows something is wrong but will anyone listen to him before it's too late?
  
  This book had a lot of promise but it just didn’t do it for me. There was sex, sex, even more sex, a murder, sex, sex, sex, and sex. Did I mention that there was a lot more sex than an actual murder mystery!? It was a disappointment. It took me forever to read just a tiny bit of this and I was bored throughout. I should have skimmed this but I was a fool.
  
  The Shards has a great title but the story within just wasn't for me. It pains me because I love books by BEE. I was hoping for another horror masterpiece that would keep me glued but it wasn't any of that for me. It was a huge letdown.
• 
  Megan Abbott

  utterly riveted by this book, which seemed to me a twisty, romantic riff on Raymond Chandler's noir classic The LONG GOODBYE, not in content but in obsessive fascination with, and nostalgia for, a lost Los Angeles. And in the nearly paralyzing anxiety of the narrator, for whom fear and desire are a constant, are the only things. So much to say about doubles, masks, secret lives, all the gorgeous noir tropes that buzz through the book.
• 
  OutlawPoet

  There are some authors who have a voice so unique that their books simply couldn’t be written by anyone else. Bret Easton Ellis is one of those and this is one of the most Bret Easton Ellis books I’ve ever read lol.
  
  I say this because if you’ve read him before and hated him, you’ll hate this. If you’ve loved him, you should love this one.
  
  Now, I went into this completely unfamiliar with the podcast – and that didn’t matter at all. I was immediately thrust into the world of elite private schools, the people who haunt them, and a serial killer who was haunting L.A.
  
  I confess that I went to a school that wanted to be one of the elite – and my kid goes to one that actually is – so certain things really hit home for me. And I absolutely loved being brought back to the L.A. of the 80’s, though I was extremely young during the time period this is set in.
  
  The serial killer story is fantastic (yes, I took to the web to find out the real story) and the coming of age aspect of the novel is painful, real and compelling.
  
  I loved this one!
  
  • ARC via Net Galley
  
• 
  Jaylen

  Is this my sentimental favorite book of all time?
  
  Hear me out. I had so much FUN reading The Shards. As much as it feels like Ellis was … dead while writing Less Than Zero, his latest novelization of this time in his life feels like it was written with introspection and dare I say… joy? Reading The Shards reminded me of the giddy experience I had reading Fear Street books as a teen, yet operating in a smart, self-aware style that I’m always looking for in fiction. I’ve been describing it as 1980s + Euphoria + Scream meets… queer longing. Which is quite simply everything I could want from a novel, aesthetically speaking.
  
  While the novel has the plotting of a thriller, The Shards subtly presents a necessary response to the aesthetic numbness that underpinned Less Than Zero. In terms of form, Ellis is doing an Annie Ernaux-ish thing here; he embraces an autofictional mode, using the novel to frame a narrative in which a fictional Bret is reckoning with his burgeoning adulthood, attempting to bridge the gaps in his fallible memory and expounding it through fiction. The character of Bret is writing Less Than Zero while the plot of The Shards plays out, revealing how 56-year old Bret is able to understand his loss of innocence from a mature vantage point. The motif of Ellis exploring his “true” self vs. him as “writer” is the crux of this book’s brilliance. A serial killer stalks LA and haunts Bret and his friends at a private boarding school. A new student joins their ranks, and Bret believes he is the killer (and is sexually attracted to him, lol). While the slasher in itself is my favorite subgenre of horror, Bret’s imposition of himself in the narrative, and thinking about how writers and murderers alike use narrative to create character out of real people, makes this a meta thrill ride that’s impossible to put down. Aside from the book’s intelligence, it was simply an immersive experience - the use of foreshadowing, 80s set pieces (LA, movies, parties, driving, sex), and the increasingly brutal revelations, made this a treat for me and I’m truly sad that it’s over despite its length. The book hangover is real with this one.
• 
  Chris Haak

  This was a brilliant read! I loved the way Ellis plays with his own identity in this book, suggesting it is autobiographical, while at the same time saying it's fiction. Furthermore, it's extremely thrilling and totally absorbing. The gory details are a bit gruesome and graphic at times; I almost couldn't continue reading. Nevertheless, a real pageturner that will occupy my mind for quite some time I think :-).
  Thank you very much Knopf and Edelweiss for the ARC.
• 
  Tom Mooney

  Bret Easton Ellis returns to fiction - and it's a mind-blowing triumph.
  
  When an author returns after so long away, there is always the fear that they won't have the same appeal, or that you have moved away from them as a reader. But The Shards is absolutely amazing. It's like a combination of the best bits of all of his previous books rolled into one.
  
  It's got sex, violence, drugs, nostalgia, melodrama, gruesome murders, masturbation, stalkers, serial killers, animal cruelty, love, lust, absent parents, wild teenagers, privilege, corruption, parties, pornography and, in this semi-fictionalised version of himself, a seductively unreliable narrator to die for.
  
  I can't tell you how much I loved it. This was the most fun I've had reading in a long, long time. BEE is BACK!
• 
  Algernon (Darth Anyan)

  “Well, I’m always looking for fresh voices,” Terry said. “It’s an exciting time for young people,” he offered blandly. “But their stories aren’t told well enough. Slasher films, sex comedies. Dumb stuff.”
  
  ‘The Shards’ isn’t a dumb novel. It may actually be too clever, too metafictional for its own good, but Bret Easton Ellis knows how to sell it to his audience: pimp it up, ramp up the violence and the flaunting of sex, drugs and money. It’s all about The Pitch , that veritable institution that turns the wheels of the dream factory that is Hollywood.
  
  ... a boy, his friends, young people in L.A., sexy, a little bi, drugs, someone is killed, there’s a chase, violence and bloodshed, a mystery the boy solves or maybe not. I preferred the downer ending but we could make it upbeat as well. I’d offer, we could negotiate that.
  
  This is the synopsis, as free of spoilers as I can make it, and in the author’s own words. Because Bret Ellis is actually the name of the narrator in this fictionalized memoir, and he is here pitching a movie idea to a big Hollywood producer. Or he is working on his first novel [‘Less Than Zero’] while attending a private college in the city of angels.
  The self-referencing is strong in this one, but don’t be deceived: it’s just another deliberate trick to create a strong fictional character. More on this later...
  
  >>><<<>>><<<
  
  As a time capsule of 1981 pop culture [The Rise of the Yuppiewalker] this novel has surpassed my expectations. The year is defined by the sudden elevation of slasher movies and teen romances from B-movie to cult status. Add to this the extended soundtrack [Ellis mentions in the afterword that he listened obsessively to hundreds of hours of music while writing this novel] and someone like me in suddenly in familiar territory, not unlike the effect of reading ‘Ready Player One’ by Ernest Cline.
  ‘The Shards’ is a Lego tower built out of the bits and pieces that defined us as teenagers. I include myself here, because I was 15 and a high-schooler when Bret Ellis was in his final year at Buckley High.
  
  A seventeen-year old boy (I’d be eighteen in March) tooling across Mulholland in a convertible Mercedes dressed in a private-school uniform and wearing Wayfarers is an image from a certain moment of empire that I was, at times, self-conscious about – did I look like an asshole? I’d briefly wonder – before thinking: I look so cool I don’t care.
  
  Of course, I didn’t have a convertible or any sort of allowance, but I was reading the same books, seeing the same movies, listening to the same mixtapes [add horny as hell into the mixture]. And I thought I got a handle on how the world works when I was not sunk into a deep well of depression.
  The true backbone of the novel is for me in these familiar Yuppie references that are uncannily relevant to the story told by Ellis, both the fictional and the real author which can get a little confusing for those of us who haven’t read other novels by the same author.
  Starting with Stanley Kubrik’s ‘The Shining’ and with several Stephen King novels, we are led logically to John Carpenter and werewolves in London, while our teenage narrator delights in promising his readers even more splattered blood and soul crushing terror in his unfolding drama. The foreshadowing is quite heavy handed [ a warning, an omen, a portent , crammed on every other page], but probably in line with the 1981 public’s expectations.
  I actually saw a John Carpenter movie from 1980 while reading the novel [ The Fog ], and it just reinforced my impression that the author is deliberately trying to emulate the slasher of presentation, much more than the teenage romances of John Hughes.
  
  With a little help from Ellis, I am also making connections between Joan Didion and Ultravox – ‘Vienna’, offered as a leitmotif to the teenage Bret’s angst: Why are you so upset? the tangible participant asked. What is so upsetting? it asked. None of this is real. .
  And I am downloading some of the albums Bret is listening to, the few that are not already on my back-up drives, like The Goo Goo Dolls, Devo and Icehouse.
  
  >>><<<>>><<<
  
  If I’m saying so little here about the main actors [Thom, Susan, Matt, Debbie, Jeff, Robert], about the late anarchist cult known as Riders of the Afterlife or about the serial killer nicknamed The Trawler, it is because I follow the authorial directions included in the text.
  
  ... it didn’t matter to me what the characters did. They existed, and I just wanted to convey a mood, immerse a reader into a particular atmosphere that was built from carefully selected details.
  
  The actual events were so much more easier to gloss over since I found most of them to be put there for shock value: stylistic inventions intended to take the reader out of his comfort zone and into raw emotion, the true stuff of a horny and insecure teenage personality.
  I didn’t like these excesses, but they do indeed strike a chord if I’m honest enough to remember how it was like to be seventeen and to wear your heart out on your sleeve, as the saying goes.
  
  But I was a storyteller and I liked decorating an otherwise mundane incident that maybe contained one or two facts that made it initially interesting to be retold in the first place but not really, by adding a detail or two that elevated the story into something legitimately interesting to the listener and gave it humor or surprise or shock, and this came naturally to me.
  These weren’t lies exactly – I just preferred the exaggerated version.
  
  This is another clever-clever way in which the author inserts his true self into the novel, with the obligatory caveat that he sets out from the start to be an unreliable narrator. I had an inkling this will be a sort of ‘Fight Club’ story right from the start . His asides about the writer’s art are nevertheless helpful to put things in perspective and avoid getting your knickers in a twist or clutching your pearls about plot holes and gratuitous violence, drugs and sex. What do I know? Maybe Hollywood teenagers were in real life as self-obsessed and status conscious as the 1980s movies tell us.
  
  There was the mask, and then there was the dangerously ill person behind the mask that we didn’t know about yet and then there was the face that was looking at the scene from a wide angle, a master shot, trying to figure out what would calm this nervous and inquisitive boy standing in front of him.
  
  I may not like the style, just as I intensely dislike Quentin Tarantino for making violence glamorous while claiming to be ironic about it, but I must give Ellis his due for achieving his stated goals in this novel: it’s not about facts, but about emotion. Nervous and inquisitive I can buy, the exaggerations not so much.
  
  ... I began to think of ways to embellish it – paint it darker, give it an eerier vibe, push evil.
  
  >>><<<>>><<<
  
  I thought this was my first experience of Bret Easton Ellis, but I was somehow in familiar territory right from the start, and not only because I clicked with the soundtrack and with the movie references. It turns out I have seen ‘The Rules of Attraction’ in cinema in its original run: because I thought Shannyn Sossamon was super hot, don’t judge me.
  Honestly, I was bored in the end, mostly by the pointless navel gazing of the main narrator [not by Shannyn], who now is revealed to be another incarnation of Bret Ellis the author. A couple of movie critics proved to be better at summing up my take on Ellis than my rambling present review. Here they are:
  
  The harder the movie tries to shock, the shriller it rings. Stephen Holden of The New York Times
  
  and,
  ...by the end, I felt a sad indifference. These characters are not from life and do not form into a useful fiction. Their excesses of sex and substance abuse are physically unwise, financially unlikely and emotionally impossible. I do not censor their behavior but lament the movie's fascination with it. Roger Ebert ultimately gave it 2 stars out of 4
  
  >>><<<>>><<<
  
  Not wanting to end my remarks on a bitter note [that nevertheless explains the three star rating], I will try to focus on what turned out to be worth the whole trip back to 1981:
  
  The facts from that fall were receding from memory but being seventeen actually became clearer to me emotionally, more focused and pressing than it ever had at fifty-six, and I realized I had needed this distance of forty years to finally begin writing the book.
• 
  Marianna Neal

  608 pages...
  608 pages!!
  
  There is no reason for this book to be 608 pages, because as I was reading it most of my time was spent waiting for something to actually happen. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn't. Most of the time I was just reading about spoiled, horny teenagers in LA. Partying, thinking they're important, doing drugs, creating drama, having sex (lots of details in that department). Which is all great, and could have worked if it was just part of the story instead of most of the story. Call me crazy, but when you're reading 608-page book that technically also has a serial killer subplot... you kind of want more about that serial killer and less about horny teens. Is it just me? It can't be just me. And to be honest, the way things wrapped up was really frustrating.
  
  Now, I am picking up on how the incessant desire to matter and be noticed, as well as to be taken seriously plays into the story that unfolds. I get it. It's interesting. Even despite some of dialogue that keeps going in circles, I still think the writing itself was mostly interesting and effective. But overall The Shards just didn't do enough of anything to justify its length. I was often bored and it was repetitive. There, I said it. It wasn't awful, I didn't hate it, but generally it was aggressively OK.
  
  This was my first Bret Easton Ellis novel, and it seems like I chose poorly. Or maybe all of his books are like this and he's just not for me. I'll still give American Psycho a read at some point. Maybe.
• 
  Joanna

  Happy Publication Day!
  
  Bret Easton Ellis is back in rare form with his first novel in thirteen years.
  
  The Shards is dark and twisted auto-fictional, metafictional, horror/thriller mixed with a bit of coming-of-age novel. If you're already a fan of BEE, you're going to enjoy this one. It's the perfect blend of Lunar Park's metaverse/alternate reality and American Psycho's gruesome serial killer horror, set in Los Angeles in the 80s with a high school senior cast starring Bret himself.
  
  It's 1981, the setting is Buckley School (a real life prep school located in the San Fernando Valley attended by the likes of Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Nicole Richie, and Bret Easton Ellis), Bret is a 17 year old aspiring writer who is part of an elite clique of high school seniors comprised of Thom, the popular jock, Susan, the class president with natural beauty - both of whom Bret is secretly in love, and Debbie, Bret's uber rich girlfriend. Their senior year of high school is filled with parties, drugs, and lots of sex. Things seem to be going great for the crew. That is until a serial killer begins to strike in Los Angeles and people they know are being murdered. The string of killings all seem to align with the arrival of the handsomely brooding new student, Robert.
  
  The interesting thing about this book is that it contains a lot of real life tidbits in it (The Trawler was a real serial killer in LA, Buckley School is real, fictional Bret and real life Bret seem to go hand and hand), making it hard for the reader to determine fact from fiction adding to the mind-bending effect of the book.
  
  The Shards may not be for everyone as it is extremely dense and very slow burn. We are talking blocks and blocks of descriptions of Bret and his friends' everyday life at Buckley - but this is necessary to set up the atmosphere, as the scenery is a character of its own. However, I was entranced with the setting at the characters, and once the mystery started unraveling I was in for a wild ride! The last 100 pages really took off. My jaw was dropped for 20 pages straight.
  
  This is how you write a thriller! This is a true horror story. Dare I say a masterpiece? Dare I say better than American Psycho? This would make an amazing movie. I will be haunted by The Shards and it's characters for a very long time. Well done Mr. Ellis.
  
  Content warnings: extremely graphic sexual content, animal abuse, graphic descriptions of murders etc.
  
  Many thanks to NetGalley, Bret Easton Ellis, and the publisher, Knopf, for the Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for my honest review.
• 
  Pow Wow

  Best thing Ellis has written. As many have noted, there are certain parallels to his overall second-best book (Lunar Park), but this is just a career-summarizing tour-de-force that I couldn't stop reading and never wanted to end. There's a maturity to it but it's not mellow and keeps a certain edge but loses the fashionably numb know-it-all demeanor from some of his more famous works. I alternately ripped through it and stopped myself just to be able to enjoy it that much longer. Also last, but not least: Brilliant sex scenes. Instant all time favorite.
  
  Also, I made a playlist of the songs mentioned in the book:
  https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ru...
  I only included songs and not albums. If albums were named I chose the title track. If the album didn't have one, I left it out.
• 
  Patrick

  Glücklicher kann mich ein Buch nicht machen.