American Psycho

[BlueAndYellowPurplePills]

Good grief. This book.
I just needed to talk about how much it’s disturbed me. I really didn’t think it would I’m not easily ruffled.
I’m 67% way through the book.
First of all it started off incredibly dull. I’m seriously sick of clothes descriptions, as soon as a sentance start “blah was wearing....” I know can skip a few paragraphs. I know understand as we go through the book this is his way of coping/ a personality thing - not quite the right words but it’ll do.
I was wondering when We’d get to the murder bits. It’s very clever in the way that builds just a hint of oddness to start, then it progresses in it descriptions, then latest murder I read made me feel sick.
I just hate how much he clearly hates women. I fear for any female he interacts with.
I can’t stop reading as I need to know that some one catches the bastard.
I can’t work if it is an amazing book or just a fucked up author who (thank goodness) is too scared to be the serial killer he wants to be.

I never managed to finish it, although I do know how it ends. The descriptions of the murders were too much for me. It was the dog that made me close the book and never open it again. I do think that someone who is able to imagine those things in order to write about them must be fairly disturbed themselves!

I should know how it ends I’m positive I’ve seen the film but can’t for the life of me remember any of it.
Possible I couldn’t bear it now.

There’s a bit where he’s too high and leave the rats he’s planning to tournament somewhere and I felt such relief for them. Made up rats. And I felt relieved. 🙄

The book's more ambiguous than the film, especially the ending.

There's a key question to consider here especially as the book gets more and more extreme, although not sure if posting it will be a spoiler so will refrain for now.

It is a disturbing book. It's supposed to be disturbing, I guess.

See that’s it isn’t it. It’s meant to make me feel horrific. If it didn’t I such be more worried...

I think it's brilliant, but I do agree that it's disturbing. I suppose I kind of liked the utter amorality of the main character and agree that he treats women as sub-human but then to him everyone is subhuman because they're not him. It's quite an extreme indictment of 1980s wall Street culture. And yes the descriptions are boring, but they're also telling: all that time about what brands people are wearing and no time at all about their character - we're all just bit parts in the story of his life.

So yes, brilliant and disturbing. I found it took up a lot of brain space.

Will you read it to the end? I think it’s an incredible book. Patrick Bateman isn’t a reliable narrator and much of it is deliberately confusing. I couldn’t put it down when I first read it and have to revisit it every so often. He doesn’t like anyone, not just women, he has no empathy and lives in a soulless consumerist void. Very disturbing.

Bret Easton Ellis is one on my favorite authors. He always writes about the rich and over privileged. He rights about people being entitled, spoiled and having anything they want and the consequences. American Pshyco is commenting on how you need to be cut throat and evil to make it in big business.

Less than zero is amazing and a classic. I also like Glamarama but it is long and a bit slow.

My misogynist, abusive ex loved this book. Tells you everything you need to know. Horrible, I also never finished it.

I have two theories about it. First was that the violence and killing never happened, it was all his fantasy of being different. Second, as it is a satire on the narcissistic culture of 80s Wall Street, that someone like him could do anything he liked and everyone else was so wrapped up in their lives no one noticed or cared. (Which given who the Wall Street people have become is doubly ironic)And everything was brought down to crushing monotony-clothes, music, violence.

I read this book once, about 20 years ago and some of the scenes still haunt me now.
I don’t think I would have been able to finish it if I had read it more recently, but at the time I had a bit of a morbid fascination of the macabre.

I’m definitely going to finish it.
The more I read it the more I understand the beginning, the discriptions and start to appreciate how the author sneaks in little details.
It is, on thinking about it and talking/ typing, very clever.
So I may have to reread it... in a few years, when I’ve got over a few bits.
I need him to be caught or killed by a woman. No spoilers please. 😁

@OhWhatFuckeryIsThisNow interesting about being in his head.. what about the detective showing up looking for Owens(?) because so far other than that i could see that, because whoever tells what he does has a reason for not hearing him or something... so does he really say it or imagine saying it?

Brilliant writing but grim subject matter. I read this book 20 years ago too...it really stayed with me. Like it or loathe it, you won’t forget it. Any of it.

Perhaps it does take up too much headspace 😱

@HeyCarrieAnneWhatsYourGame

I love the book, and the authors other work and the film. I'm a woman and neither abusive or misogynistic.

Don't judge a brilliant work of fiction based on one twatt liking it.

I haven’t read this book for years. I remember skipping chunks, either because they were so boring when going on and on about labels and how great Whitney Houston is, or because too violent.

I read it as a satire, on how anonymous and consumerist society was. The bits where he kept getting mistaken for someone else, or would say things nobody listened too. The obsession with having a hard body. The cleaner just cleaning up after him so there was no trace of what he’d done.

It’s been so long that only small bits stick in my mind. The urinal cake scene, for some reason.

I also read “Story of my Lfe” by Jay Mckinerny around the same time and swear either Patrick Bateman or Alison Poole pop up in the other’s book. This could be a false memory however, which could be ironic given the other interpretation of American Psycho.

FWIW I never took the narrative as the fantasies of of a disturbed man...I took it as describing the actions of the malignant narcissistic psychopath he is portrayed as.
I thought of it as a commentary on societal tendencies to value convention, money, seeming success as a measure of worth, our devaluation of women, our wilful blindness.

He's a psychopath, that's why he does into so much detail about how he looks, things to do with him etc.

I actually liked the book in a weird way, it was a strange insight to a strange mind.

I read Lolita however and just hated that, boring and definitely not as F-ed up as I was expecting from reviews.

I ‘liked’ it when he would say outrageous things that no one else took any notice of. He was blatant yet easily evaded detection. Thought it was clever writing. I did like this book at 22. Not sure I’d have the stomach for it now.

I read this over 20 years ago and bits of it I still remember clearly, in a way that I just don't remember other books. It is very very disturbing. But I do think it's very clever.

I thought it was very well written and agree with OhWhatFuckery’s summation. And I agree that Less Than Zero is brilliant.
Anyone who reads it like HeyCarrieAnne’s ex, as a sort of template, probably read Catcher in the Rye and thought Holden was meant as a role model

I read this around the time that it came out and sometimes an unusual book catches you at an unusual lifestage. Now the book colours my memory of that time in the same way as my experiences of that time affected my understanding of the book.

I was a trailing spouse living in Berlin, no kids yet. It was that weird panicky period between Nick Leeson bringing down Barings and the turn of the century. The European Central Bank was bringing in loads of new regulations to try and control banking behaviour and stop another Nick Leeson plus all computer systems needed to be updated to cope with a four digit year code. Banks all over Europe were throwing money at people with computer and banking experience. At this one bank that DH was working for there were about 15-20 people on the bank regulations team and about 30 on the Y2K team. The most junior earned about £400 per day and the experienced team leader level was over £1K per day.

Berlin is a party city so there was always groups going out. DH and I would sometimes go for dinner and drinks but a lot of them would keep partying and would fairly frequently end the night in the brothel on Savignyplatz. Loads (single and not single) of them had an ever-renewing girlfriend, usually an incredibly glamorous Russian, who was dumped as soon as she wanted to get serious. It was generally pretty macho with a lot of big talk, there was a core group that were very competitive, always had the newest phone the day it came out, always wore a Patek Phillipe watch, designer clothes etc. They were always spouting off about how brilliant/brave/tough they were, if one of them had said that he had killed someone we probably would have humoured him and then not thought about it again.

Then I read the book, and it was so recognisable to me, just set in New York not Europe. I always read it as mostly happening in his imagination, but I did wonder if any of DH's colleagues were the same on the inside. I had my suspicions about a few.

weaselwords Alison Poole first appeared in Story Of My Life and in another of BEE’s books later on.

I wasn’t imagining it. She is in American Psycho. eastonellis.fandom.com/wiki/Alison_Poole

Bret Eastern ellis' books exsist in the same world so characters pop up in different books. Partick Bateman is the brother of the main character in Rules of attraction.