#724 in our old book database. Not rated.

This is one of the most fascinating books I've read. It is also the most appalling thing I have ever read. As such, while I would readily recommend this book, I feel that under no good conscience could I actually do so.

If you've seen the 2000 film, that will give some idea of what to expect, but the film only touches the surface of what is in the book. Less a story than a continuing mental narrative of a rich Wall Street business man who approaches his exterior with exacting attention to detail while his interior barely passes for human. What starts with meticulous listings of what people are dressed in via style, material, and brand name is intruded upon by increasing graphic descriptions of violence as the narrative becomes more unhinged. "See me" he seems to plead, but no one does.

I am in no way surprised this book is so controversial, but I also believe that it's a powerful critique of what occupies our attention in society. ( )

Patrick Bateman is one of the most intersting characters I've read in a novel, and even after reading him mentally deteriorate as the novel progresses, I still can't exactly explain his character. His actions are precarious, and some of his most heinous acts have no rational behind them or are from trivial matters. For those wanting to give this a read, bear with the first couple 100-150 pages, as those are the slowest pages. The book really picks up pace after then. If you're coming from the movie, know that the movie was essentially a heavily-censored version of the novel. The kills are graphic and may make you feel queasy, especially since no demographic is safe (kids and animals included). The clothing descriptions and scenes are superfluous and can be difficult to read. The chapters on Whitney Houston, Phil Collins, Huey Lewis, etc. help accentuate his character, but they are skippable chapters.

Some things I noted
-Way too much cleansing and exfoliating, but he doesn't have time to floss?? Also no sun screen but uses anti aging products. He also says to shave the sideburns and chin for last, but upon further research you should shave your upper lip and chin for last.
-Classic business card scene
-Classic dry cleaning scene
-Patty Winters Show reflects his mental state in each chapter
-Christmas Party chapter and Bethany chapter were awesome
-His brother bagged Dorsia first attempt
-The death of the 2 girls in Paul Owen's place were brutal
-The rat scene
-Killing the 5 year old boy was so bleak ( )

For the most part, this book is a classic satire on toxic masculinity, white privilege, and economic inequality. It is so well written that at times I wondered if Ellis was doing a damning condemnation on these things, or if he was admitting what was going on in the inner recesses of his own id. Obviously, the film, which was written to be a feminist criticism of various structures, has a much better P.O.V. that doesn't force you to wonder if you should be laughing with it or at it.

However, my big problem is the length of the book. He really needed an editor to cut down on some things. It starts out okay; with an understanding of Patrick's psyche, snapshots of his life, and the eventual murders. But it becomes far too repetitive in the middle sections. The ending is fine, especially as the writing style--like the voice change and Patty Winters Show--evolve into surrealism. But the repetitiveness, especially on the sex and murder descriptions become a bit too much. The film fixes this however, by having the Psycho style thrills of witnessing a killer being chased after.

Still, as we continue to live in a world where social inequalities along gender, race, class, and consumerism continue to upset people's fragile grasp on reality, this holds up as a great book. Recommended. ( )

Reread, after over a decade and remembered why I love this book. ( )

This is a great satire where the bouts of shallow, tedious and uninformed conversation serves to hypnotize you and let the shock and gore come on through with the detached, non-sequitur quality that makes it work. It also has some wonderfully absurd and comedic moments. Unfortunately it really outstays its welcome by hammering the same chord for 400 pages. At 300 this would be a really great, tight novel. Unfortunately you're saying "yeah I get it" a lot before the yup, yup, yup of the end. Very similar to Funny Games. ( )

A full third of the way into this novel I was thinking it couldn’t stay this quiet much longer; even with nothing happening though, it was still like sitting watching a loudly ticking unexploded bomb. The author was clearly doing something right, whatever it was, and doing it brilliantly…
    We’re in the 1980s, Manhattan’s financial district, and the 26-year-old Patrick Bateman works on Wall Street—or at least, he has an office he goes to, because there are no descriptions of actual work. Instead, his life is an endless round of fashionable restaurants and bars; of manicures, facials and work-outs at the gym. It’s not just a particular time and place being described here though—̕80s music, yuppies, the Walkman, the Filofax—because there have always been people in the world like Bateman. To sum him up in a single word: contempt. He has contempt for the homeless begging on New York’s streets every day, contempt for cab drivers and waiters, contempt for anyone who doesn’t share his meticulously detailed eye for designer clothes and accessories, for his obsession with grooming, with style. Because that’s what he is: style with nothing substantial behind it. I’ve heard this novel described as a Clockwork Orange for the 1980s, but it’s nothing like it: there, Alex takes real pleasure in things—in Beethoven’s music, in ultra-violence—while here, Bateman seems incapable of pleasure. He has everything material (looks, money, the freedom to indulge himself any way he pleases) but enjoys none of it. Does he even really do any of the things he eventually describes, the tortures and the murders (they don’t quite add up and he seems to get away with it all far too easily)? Or are these his fantasies of what he’d like to do to the people around him?
    This isn’t about “the 1980s culture of greed”. What it does do, in razor-sharp prose, is bring to life some of the people who have existed in every decade, in every city, and are still running things now. At one point Bateman says to himself, “It would make absolutely no difference if I was an automaton” and maybe that’s the fascination of this novel. The scenes for which it’s notorious are in fact a very small part of it; my own horrified fascination came from spending a few days inside Bateman’s good-looking, well-groomed but utterly empty, head. ( )

Genuinely disturbing. ( )

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

Let's face it: Patrick is a sick and evil man. Intelligent, good looking, working in a high pressured job, where noone really knows each other or cares what happens. He lives in a superficial world where more onus is put on the clothes you wear or the paper your business card is printed on than you actions as a human being.

The book has its awful moments - the explicit desctiptions of what Patrick gets up to (the torture of the prostitutes etc) are difficult (almost impossible) to read. However, if you step away from this and look at the book as a whole I think this gives an excellent commentary on the 1980s and the "me me" generation.

And it amuses me to read reviews of "i found this book disgusting but still finished it"!. If you dont like a book, you can put it down - noone is forcing you to read it! ( )

Extremely funny outside of the gore.
Main character loves Donald Trump and gets mad when others make fun of Cheetos man. Hilarious. ( )

I have an overwhelming urge to trap rats after reading this book.

Meh. I didn't really care for it although I did get through the whole audiobook so...
The book really only has one trick; a banal, matter-of-fact almost clinical tone throughout even while it describes scenes of porn and extreme gore. The only thing that really caught my attention was when the POV shifted when the titular American Psycho Patrick Bateman disassociated and the reality of his whole murderous rampage comes into question. Other than that, the endless brand name product lists and boring conversations that Patrick is also not paying attention to got to be somewhat tedious.
The animal cruelty also got to me, it's something I frankly just steer clear of in my media choices these days. Overall, I don't really see the draw of this work. It didn't strike me as particularly original other than in its bland prose which I understand is a stylistic choice but it simply did not engage me. Its content is composed of dull shallow conversations focused on products and gossip between the characters, pornographic scenes, and splatterpunk-esque shock gore scenes. Again, I know this was intended by the author for the most part but this book was not my cup o' blood.
I can't really recommend this unless you have a morbid curiosity for a popular work. However, I think the movie is leagues better than the book in this case. ( )

just finished for the 2nd time this year. brilliant, witty, disturbing, incisive. definitely not for everyone though. ( )

Patrick Bateman, it must be noted, had an unusual obsession with Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump is mentioned at least a dozen times throughout Bret Easton Ellis’s now-iconic 1991 novel “American Psycho”. I’m just throwing that fact out because it seems significant.

Indeed, Ellis’s novel—-controversial when it was first published—-still seems significant now, in 2023, for reasons that are not dissimilar to the reasons cited 33 years ago.

I did not read the book 33 years ago. I was graduating high school when the book came out. My summer of ’91 was occupied with packing for college and living with that nervous excitement that precedes a major life-change: freshman year of college. I didn’t have time to read it, even if I wanted to, which I didn’t. In fact, the book was never really on my radar.

Oh, I had heard about it, and when I arrived on campus and met new friends, many of whom were far more literate than myself, I overheard the conversations about how misogynistic and racist and homophobic the book was, and how vile Ellis must be. I would never read such a book, and anyone who did (and, God forbid, liked it) must be the worst kind of disgusting monster, the type who probably voted for George H.W. Bush and liked war and date rape and celebrated awful holidays like Columbus Day, which was nothing more than a celebration of imperialism and genocide. (This is how I talked in college. Not because I actually necessarily believed this shit, but mostly because I was trying to get cute college girls to play with my penis, and most of them talked like this, too.)

It would be three decades before I picked up “American Psycho” and actually read it. And, weirdly, liked it.

Nobody told me that it was hilarious. The fact that it is a very funny, very dark satirical comedy seemed to have been skipped over or ignored in the many conversations I had had about the book.

Also, I was old enough and mature enough as a reader to now distinguish the fact that the virulent misogyny/racism/homophobia evident in the book was not coming from Ellis but was, in fact, a symptom of the protagonist’s psychosis. Ellis did such a good job of getting in the head of a deplorable, soulless, homicidal monster that, I now recognize, many readers came away thinking that Ellis was the monster. People also often forget that Frankenstein was the name of the monster’s creator and not the monster itself.

Being more well-read than I was as freshman in college, I saw the blatant allusions to Jane Austen, and how Ellis was painting a satirical picture of the vapid and shallow consumer culture of the “Me-First” rich white upper class. I saw in Patrick Bateman the parody of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street”, in which greed and self-interest is played up as a virtue in Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko. I understood where the obsession that Bateman had with serial killers like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy came from, as serial killers were kind of all the rage in the ‘90s.

I even saw the parallels between “American Psycho” and Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, in which Bateman—-clearly Ahab—-suffers from an obsessive-compulsive quest to find his own white whale: a conscience or any kind of emotion that would make him feel human in some way. New York City and Wall Street become, for Bateman, the rough seas that he must sail. His vicious and inhuman murders become a kind of religious rite he uses to summon something—-anything—-lurking beneath his superficial existence. I even understood the three chapters in which Bateman extolls the discographies of Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News: three of the most popular and, in many ways, vapidly commercial artists of the ‘80s. They are the epitome of shallowness, which describes Bateman to a ’t’.

And, of course, the constant references to Trump (which, since the book was written 20 years before Trump had any vocal designs of being President, is simply bizarrely prescient), a man who, even at that time, was a human imprimatur of everything sleazy and gauche regarding the wealthy, are voluminously apropos.

The book still shocks. For today’s post-Trump post-Covid audience, that’s definitely a good thing. If the book didn’t shock or disgust readers, that would be too horrible to contemplate.

I can understand why this book is much loved and much hated. It’s not a book that would engender mild feelings of indifference or “meh” in anyone who reads it. One either loves it or hates it.

I’m on the “love” side, and it’s because I understand what Ellis was trying to say. He was expressing a disgust and hatred for a warped sense of reality and dark side of humanity that he saw hiding in plain sight and that could only grow into something more dangerous—-and, in fact, did under Trump’s presidency. For this reason—-and all of the others previously cited—-“American Psycho” is, in my opinion, a vital American literary classic. ( )

Good prose, great social commentary, gore filled kills. Some parts of the murder scenes were incredibly hard to get through, and I get that that’s the point but…

This book is horribly racist and sexist, and starts to ask the question of when does a mocking imitation come full circle? ( )

“All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great”. ( )

what can I say? I like the dark side. ( )

What!? Like seriously, what the hell? What is this book??!! I guess there was some underlying satire and hidden meaning that I missed while slogging through descriptions of morning routines and what everyone was wearing. God it was tedious! Names and faces blended together, although I think that was intentional since everyone was mistaken for someone else during the course of the book. But full chapters on the narrators thoughts on certain musicians of the time? Read the first, completely skipped the next few. The sex and murder scenes were interesting, and well thought out, maybe a little too well thought out, and borderline over the top, and I say borderline since that stuff interests me, a novice to field would probably be sick to their stomachs.
But seriously, what the hell did I just read? Picking this book up after putting it down for a time was like going back to sleep after a nightmare and restarting the nightmare where it left off.
I'm sure I missed some snarky commentary of the times or something, but I couldn't concentrate well enough on finding hidden meaning because I was sinking in the quicksand of over description and designer clothes, and restaurant reservations, and whether video tapes were returned or not, and...nvm...I'm done. ( )

Couldn't finish it. ( )

A hilarious albeit bloody social commentary? A sadistic trip dripping with yuppy scorn? Banal journal entries peppered with torture porn? Clever? Daft?

This one is hotly contested, comments running the gamut from trash to masterpiece. It's also a banned book, getting a lot of attention in events about banning. First, I enjoyed the reading of it, but primarily because I knew the conceit involved and viewed it as somewhat of an exercise in looking for the clues layer into the narrative that reveal the conceit. But too much of the novel seems designed to shock, Ellis purposely seeing how far he could go before an editor reined him in. Just a few of the murder scenes, and ones shaved down a bit, would have done the trick and communicated the excesses Ellis was trying to highlight. Ellis is a good writer, but he needed a good editor here to save the book.

3 bones!!! ( )

Chills on chills during the golden chapters, some are extremely boring to read. It's a 50/50, but I truly enjoyed the better parts of this book. ( )

I expected this book to be very graphic, and it superceded those expectations by a pretty good margin, but putting that to one side, I just thought this story could have been told in about 100 less pages without losing a thing.

Set in the uber materialistic 80's, yuppie Patrick Bateman has no conscience or empathy. The entire book is his pov, and I found that conceptually very interesting and well done. The problem though is every other character is a cardboard cutout, which makes sense because they are seen from Bateman's perspective, but leaves the book with strictly a dark satire. And that is not a genre I generally enjoy unfortunately.

There are some very witty scenes in here. And it is pretty funny that Bateman's idol is Donald Trump . . .almost more funny now than when the book was written. But that wasn't enough to overcome endless descriptions of clothes (zzzz) and food (better). ( )

3.1

Sick. ( )