Book Review: The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

This is a terrifying book. And I'm not so good with terrifying books. In the past few weeks I actually spent time on many days dreading having to read this book before going to bed, and I spent time on many nights waking up and hoping there was no one else in the house creeping around and rearranging things. So by that scale, I think you can say that Bret Easton Ellis's The Shards is a successful thriller. Eight out of ten hot dogs!

For those who don't know (or are too young to remember when Ellis was a big deal), Bret Easton Ellis was anointed the next great literary hero in the 80s after publishing Less Than Zero while still in college. His star continued to shine until the publication of the oft-misunderstood American Psycho, when high society pretty much left him for dead. Ellis continued writing for a while, then around the turn of the century started working for Hollywood, working on screenplays (many of which were never produced) and putting together the infamous movie The Canyons. When his Hollywood card played out, Ellis returned to fiction, with The Shards his latest offering.

What really makes the book work is how vehemently Ellis works in the prologue to make you believe that the story he relates about high school in the early 80s mixed in with a ritualistic serial killer is 100% true and is the story he really wanted to write in Less Than Zero. What really makes that take hold (even though this is DEFINITELY a work of pure fiction) is that the main character of the story is...Bret Easton Ellis. Many stories are told in the first person to make them more relatable, but when the main character is actually the writer (and a rather off-center writer at that), it makes for a powerful tale.

I don't want to give too much away because it's kind of a mystery (even though it may not seem like it at the start of the book), but I did want to relate a couple of random things:

• One of the things Ellis was known for bringing to high-end fiction was lurid descriptions of sex, and, later, gore. Long-time readers will not be disappointed, as this book does indeed include plenty of sex and gore. If you're a hardcore conservative, you might want to skip this book because...it's not the kind of sex you're thinking about.

• This book has given me impetus to listen to some of the songs on Sirius XM's First Wave channel that I usually skip over

• My first experience reading a book with an unreliable narrator actually came really late in life. I lived in LA for a month in 2000, and while there I picked up a copy of Jay McInerney's Story of My Life (for some reason every time I think of that book my first thought is standing on the Malibu pier as the sun was going down and seeing a beautiful woman walking around wearing an Astroturf bikini top, although I'm not sure why the ideas are related). There's a point in the book where someone mentions something that you KNOW didn't happen (I'm not going to spoil it - it's a great book!), only for the narrator to start the next chapter apologizing for not mentioning it earlier. I was stunned - I had never experienced something like that before. It made you wonder if all narrators in all books are 100% honest.

• As longtime readers may know, I love to turn stories into movies in my head. In this movie, Bret Easton Ellis was played by Mark Sheppard. I don't know why a senior in a posh LA high school would be played by a balding pudgy British guy in his 40s, but it also worked COMPLETELY.

Of the five Ellis novels I've read, I would put this one in the middle - which is not an insult, because it's quite an oeuvre. Very much worth reading...but you might want to keep the lights on!