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hollowstone.press · @hollowstone.press@bridge.neodb.net

Rated American Psycho 8/10

The perennial ‘I must get round to reading that’ American Classic, all my information around this book came from the buzz that accompanied the film. As is so often the case everyone who read the book maligned how little of the book’s greatness made it into the film, and since I loved the film I made a mental note to read it someday. While I am now exceptionally glad I did, unlike the film I will not be feeling any need to revisit the book again.<br/><br/>The story of one man’s descent into an utterly unbridled insanity that goes completely unnoticed and unremarked in the greed centred Wall Street scene of the late Eighties, this book has a tremendous sadist’s eye view on the world. Nothing is left aside in Bateman’s life, not the inane conversations about restaurant bookings, the obsession with eighties pop music, or the stomach turning gore drenched descriptions of his killing sprees. After reading the book I had a conversation with someone who loved the book but couldn’t get past the gore. I felt the same, which is why by the end I was skipping whole chunks until things went back to normal (for Bateman anyway) again. In fact, I think this is what Ellis wants us to do. He signposts the need to skip ahead early on when he has Bateman spend five pages of dense unpunctured text going on about Genesis and Phil Collins. To me he is saying to his audience ‘yes this man is utterly unhinged, why don’t you go and make a cup of coffee and when you get back he’ll be back to taunting the homeless or something more interesting.’<br/><br/>The whole book is like one great long diatribe against a cruel and empty world, a world that taunts the unfortunate and the poor, that sees anyone not like them as utterly devoid of merit from a man who looks around him at this world without meaning and jumps to the wrong conclusions about his own place in it. It is both captivating and repulsive, and as the book goes along and Bateman gets less hinged so too does the gore and the madness. The utterly unfulfilling end only adds to the bewildering state the novel left me in. A tour de force of language, of imagination and well worth reading, even if I’ll never want to read it again.

#book

Published 2012-01-14 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere