In the American rebel’s latest tome, autofiction meets grubby LA Noir to create a haunting 80s medley of teen desire and pop culture that goes back to the roots of the Easton Ellis universe.
It’s been a long time since Easton Ellis has thrilled his fans. His non-fiction book White threw him into the social media pit of internet outrage, and it remained to be seen if he could redeem himself for many with this, his first novel in thirteen years. And rightly, he’s taken no chances here. As he did in the weirdly lockdown-esque autofiction horror, Luna Park, he uses an avatar of Bret Easton Ellis, gay author, as the protagonist, basing the story around a group of slutty rich friends in the final years of a glittering LA school for the privileged in the early eighties. Playing heavily to his strengths, he employs motifs of Hollywood iconography such as top-down cars, Mulholland vistas, lush mothers, gay predatory dads, forgotten packets of cocaine, queer sex by the pool, brunch in mirrored Wayfarers, and of course, that very Hollywood trope, the serial killer.
As the Bret of the novel recounts the facts of the year that this group of friends lost their not-so-innocent innocence (think Less Than Zero), the novel becomes a kind of IT-like setup between the remaining gang as they are in the present day and the horrific events that occurred to form them at school. At over five hundred pages, the novel’s similarity to IT doesn’t stop there, but unlike King’s unnecessarily neverending tome, Easton Ellis needs this length to get to the meat of things.
However, while the book is darkly absorbing and sees the author back on form in some respects, the editing leaves something to be desired. At times, clauses and propositions are muddled, and run-on sentences inhabit every paragraph. While this could be said to be a choice of the author in favor of the vernacular, it’s a rather poor one, as it slows down reading, and sometimes, comprehension of the scene. Other times, conventions for dates or names, established earlier on, break down, almost as if editing dropped off after they’d polished the first section. This leaves some of the biography-style writing rather flabby and dry, reading more like an old man’s self-published memoir than a sharp writer’s intentional gabbing.
The plot is unapologetic in its heavy reliance on the true-crime cases of serial killers of California, with the most nods going to The Golden State Killer and the Manson Family. This, combined with the descriptions of the heady days of cruising Los Angeles with the radio turned up, the impression is that of a John Hughes/Joel Schumacher style movie in the offing, neon flashing by under the Hollywood sign as our narrator Bret affirms his sexuality, diligently attends the punk dives of Sunset, and begins his first novel as the coyotes howl in the dark and the prowler’s knife flashes.
The novel is, all in all, more than a little bit smoke and mirrors and definitely down a few slices of ham, but hats off to him, Easton Ellis kind of invented this shit, and while it’s far from as muscular and punchy as American Psycho, it’s a damn good read that should win back the doubters.
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