Later, Bateman revisits Paul Owen's apartment, where he had earlier killed and mutilated two prostitutes, carrying a surgical mask in anticipation of the decomposing bodies he expects to encounter. American Psycho is seemingly all details, and some of the details are inspired, like the constant references to Les Miserables, a grim yet toe-tapping exploration of the bleak lives of the wretched of the earth enjoyed by people rich enough to afford tickets to its endless Broadway run. Social media and platforms such as 4chan, Reddit or TikTok have seen in him a reflection of the modern culture’s obsession with sex, money and physical appearance.

A multi-million -copy bestseller hailed as a modern classic, it is a violent black comedy about the darkest side of human nature. One of them explains that he likes to taunt homeless people by holding out a dollar, then snatching it away at the last second. In a 2014 appearance on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Ellis stated that Bateman's narration was so unreliable that even he, as the author of the book, did not know if Bateman was honestly describing events that actually happened or if he was lying or even hallucinating.Ellis’ trademark use of cineliterate references, his nihilistic portrait of youth, and his impactfully graphic depictions of violence and eroticism are all present, as well as some not-so-veiled criticism of unchecked and vapid privilege.

The novel opens with a sign scrawled above a New York subway station: "Abandon hope all ye who enter". Canons of Transgression: Shock, Scandal, and Subversion from Matthew Lewis's The Monk to Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho" (PDF). A literal, exhaustively faithful adaptation of American Psycho would run six hours, be banned in every country, and be unwatchable, but these filmmakers did a spectacular job alchemizing literary dross into cinematic gold.

Following several increasingly metafictional novels and a few bad screenplays, White is Ellis’s first foray into nonfiction, and the result is less a series of glorified, padded-out blog posts than a series of regular, normal-size blog posts. Honestly, I found the idea that a man who does not work in fashion would instantly be able to identify so much information about every garment he comes across far more unrealistic than Bateman murdering dozens of people in brutal, perverse, and fairly public ways and never getting caught.

Why does no one notice that he is, by his own account, the greatest serial killer in American history? Mistaking Bateman for another colleague, Carnes claims that the Patrick Bateman he knows is too much of a coward to have committed such acts. The premiere of the musical, with music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik opened at the Almeida Theatre, London in December.The book has garnered notoriety for its graphic violence and has led to it being censored in multiple countries. but, again, this does not mean that it is the author's job (or the creator of 'good art') to proceed along those lines. For instance, he mentions a serrated knife in his pocket, and masturbating to a movie scene in which a woman is murdered.

It was impossible to form any kind of emotional connection with him and, because of the first person narration, it was also impossible to form much of an emotional connection with anything or anyone else in the novel.The phrase describes the first-person narrator (Swift's Gulliver, Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Stevens in The Remains of the Day) whose account is so partial that the reader must see beyond it. Ellis does not realize he is talking about himself, an angry, uninteresting man who has just written a very needy book.