American Psycho (Vintage Contemporaries)

A Breath-taking read.

Disgusting but what a page turner!! Disgusting page turner!

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American Psycho is not for the faint of heart-- it is far more graphic even than the film version-- but if you can stomach it, it is worth the read. Ellis's illustration of his main character's unravelling psyche calls to mind elements of Nabokov, Dostoeyvski, and Anthony Burgess's A Clock Work Orange. There's Bateman's obsessive compulsion toward all things...more

American Psycho is not for the faint of heart-- it is far more graphic even than the film version-- but if you can stomach it, it is worth the read. Ellis's illustration of his main character's unravelling psyche calls to mind elements of Nabokov, Dostoeyvski, and Anthony Burgess's A Clock Work Orange. There's Bateman's obsessive compulsion toward all things material (shown through detailed descriptions of every name brand piece of clothing worn by every character), and there's also his odd love of light-hearted pop music (entire chapters devoted to Genesis as fronted by Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis & The News are surrounded by some of the goriest, most brutal scenes in the novel). It's in all these details that Ellis best depicts the stark contrast between Bateman's seemingly-perfect alpha male artifice, and the psychotic killer that lies beneath-- a fitting allegory for the greedy 1980's (and for Wall Street's role in our current economic crisis, too)...   hide

Makes the movie look like Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. If you don't like the chapters about music and wardrobe, then you just don't get it...

Absorbing!

This book is graphic and disturbing. It is also some of the best satire I have read.

a satire that doesn't read like one. pages and pages of detailed descriptions of outfits and accessories that bore me to tears. unnecessarily gory and miserable. it made me hate everything i looked at so i got to the last 20 pages and stopped reading it.

Searing indictment of the 80s, its obsession with appearance and money, and the oblivious nature of its inhabitants to the violence around them, both that inflicted by Patrick Batement and that inflicted by the society they created on the world at large.