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American Psycho | 
| Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1075 reviews
Sales Rank: 981
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0679735771
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679735779
ASIN: 0679735771
Publication Date: March 1, 1991
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: NO JUNK book has one page with small tear rest of book is in brand new shape, no other marks, tears, or creases, next day ship in jiffy envelope
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Product Description
Now a major motion picture from Lion's Gate Films starring Christian Bale (Metroland), Chloe Sevigny (The Last Days of Disco), Jared Leto (My So Called Life), and Reese Witherspoon (Cruel Intentions), and directed by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol).
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1070 more reviews...
 A Nightmarish Comedy of Manners July 20, 2008
American Psycho is Bret Easton Ellis' grotesque comedy about the decadent underbelly of Wall Street culture in the 1980s, as experienced firsthand through protagonist Patrick Bateman. The book is the only example I have read of controlled and literate obscenity. Few books demand their readers to both laugh and cringe in disgust. Ellis accomplishes this by combining a Zeitgeist protagonist (as Fyodor Dostoevsky does in Notes from Underground), a comedy of manners (consider a very twisted Jane Austen), and the 1980s American height of materialism and capitalism.
The novel is not as overwhelming as all of that sounds, because Ellis is a fantastic teacher. He eases you into the themes of the overall satire he is attempting to compose, so that when the first shock comes, at least you have been partially primed for the graphic imagery it conjures.
One of the novel's constant jokes concerns excruciating details about the brand names of the material possessions in the Bateman's vicinity and, sometimes, his judgments of the people who own those possessions. Ellis does a great job helping the reader plow through the barrage of high-end designer labels and features of new-fangled gadgets by writing the novel in an exuberant and often manic first person, present tense narrative. Almost all fiction is written in past tense, and it's refreshing for Ellis to try something few attempt, and to do it well.
I found that reading the book out loud makes the humor rise from the page, especially during the scenes when Bateman endlessly catalogues the contents of his purchases from an upscale store or the respective entrees of his friends while they dine at a trendy restaurant. I did not read the gruesome scenes of rape, torture, and murder out loud, however. I admit that I didn't want to get too close to those words.
I initially thought that the book was too long. Almost everything that is going to happen occurs within the first 250 pages of the book, and the rest of the novel (with the exception of the final 30 pages) is comprised largely of variations on the themes. In short, I started to get slightly bored, and I thought maybe the book wasn't as well written as I had thought. Then I realized that Bateman, too, was getting bored and it hit me: I've become as desensitized as the protagonist. It's then that I understood clearly one of the novel's powerful understatements: Any of us has the potential to be Patrick Bateman. Certainly, such a notion isn't likely to be rendered real, but it does mean that Bateman is operating within the scope of humanity; granted, he's at the division between human and demon. It also means that the length of the text is perfect.
In the end, Ellis wants his readers to understand that life reduced to overpriced suits and food, designer drugs and bottled water, un-spendable amounts of wealth, ultra metrosexuality and obsessive health consciousness, and mind-numbing and soul-crushing careers are in fact the polite and fashionably correct equivalents of rape, torture, and murder. The reader is left to decide what to do about it.
 Its all about the clothes. June 22, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I'm guessing that this book was suppose to be about Bateman living in a society where everyone is fake. But all I got out of it was whole chapters on Whintey Huston and several pages out of fashion magazines. Along with the graphic scences and odd writing style, this book is very hard to get into.
Worth reading even if you don't like the genre June 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Truthfully this is a brutal book about a psychopath. It is also a compulsively readable book. I find violent movies and violent books repulsive as a rule, but sometimes I come across one and give in and read it. And then put it down as unbearable because the story or the character is not good enough to outweigh my revulsion at the topic. I guess I have a nervous stomach or a vivid imagination. I know the genre has it's fans and I don't want to denigrate that.
American Psycho was an exception for me. I put it back on my wish list to remind myself that this is a book I plan to re-read. I also want to read other books by Brett Easton Ellis.
 Not just another slasher. June 19, 2008
American Pycho is not your check out/super market thriller/horror. It's a thriller meant for people who seem to have a serious chip on their shoulder about the 80s and the thoughs who are young urban professionals. And it is defiantly not a book for people who have short attention spans.
Ellison writes in the form of 1920 satires, where that narrator describes things to death. Mind numbing detail about things that on the surface don't have anything to with the story of homicidal maniac Patrick Batemen, and obviously because of this type of narrative the book is extremely slowed paced.
However if one understands what Ellison is trying to do, this type of satire fits right in. Bateman is hopelessly obsessive with his appearance and is constantly measuring himself up to his peers, if he feels annoyed or extremely angry at any of them he will not hesitate to kill them. His serial rape and murder of various women has no real set pattern. The detail enriched narrative focusing on fashion and chic restaurants and clubs is right for the story about a psychopathic materialistic yuppie
 Examines the dark side of the mind June 7, 2008
A main feature of American Psycho, is how Bret Easton Ellis is capable of including the reader as a part of the story. By his several pages descriptions of his morning dressing, exercice and make up, the dishes they get served in fancy New York Restaurants and the songs on the albums he listens to Eliis succeeds to make the reader as bored as Bateman is. Because for the first several hundred pages of the book, bored, rich and not too empathic toward people worse off than himself is what Patrick Bateman - and probably many of the readers is.
When Patrick Bateman finally puts imagination into practice and starts elimintating what he regards as the trash of society - prostitutes, beggars, black people and colleges standing in the way for him making more money, Bret Easton Ellis manages to make the observant reader to realize that the descusting monster Patrick Bateman might has more in common with the dark side of their own personality than they care about. One of the most magnificant ways that Ellis illustrates this point is by the many comments he acomplishes to make people complain about their stomach - as if they got a unsatisfactory meal in a restaurant - rather than identifying how relevant his objections really is. This projective way of writing makes Ellis a part of the inherritage of James Joyce, who in Ulysses introduced this litterary tradition of combating rather than amusing and entertain the reader, while the reader's reaction to what he reads works as an integrated part of the story the writer wants to tell.
On this basis of this same tradition of I regard many of the objections about American Psycho - as boring, a challenge for the stomach etc as rather irrelevant. They can simply not have understood that this feelings that Ellis novel provoces in the reader, is the Writers aim. Alternatively they can not recognize that the dark side of the mind has a place in litterature. If you agree on this view, American Psycho is not a book for you. If you belive that the dark side of the mind indeed has a place in litterature, even that the dark side of the mind indeed can be the subject of some of the greatest litterature, if you are ready to spend some time on puzzeling with understanding what the writer is aiming at and may be even is ready to identify and take in that you, yourself might be a part of the problem that the book identifies, this is definately a book for you.
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