I discovered Bret Easton Ellis shortly after my 13th birthday, which is really the only time you should discover Bret Easton Ellis. He was the author of choice for prodigious brats and queers, a swishy nonsense nihilist who had, years earlier, appalled the literary establishment with novels about Wall Street sociopaths and ambisexual teen druggies. The horror and the allure of Ellis’s work was in their trim, colourless prose: Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho were tales of lurid sex and violence presented so flatly that they were almost mundane. “I look up, admiringly, at Trump Tower, tall, proudly gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight,” goes his poreless, proto-looksmaxxer serial killer Patrick Bateman. “In front of it two smartass n***** teenagers are ripping off tourists at three-card monte and I have to fight the impulse to blow them away.”
Ellis was dangerous and nasty, and so blithely unconcerned about his own controversy-stoking that he made teenage-me swoon. That said, I haven’t read or much thought about Bret Easton Ellis since those days. He is an eternally adolescent proposition, like Blue Banana or contraband WKDs in the park, which is probably why he’s fallen so aggressively out of favour. If the literati never particularly dug him, and his juvenile fandom grew up, who’s left? The stragglers picked up by Ellis’s lengthy post-Obama Twitter rants about wokeness and the “professionally aggrieved”? Do they even read books?
