Synopses & Reviews
Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to a head-on collision with America's greatest dream - and its worst nightmare - American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.
'Serious, clever and shatteringly effective' Sunday Times
'American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel . . . The novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly . . . A seminal book' Fay Weldon, Washington Post
'For its savagely coherent picture of a society lethally addicted to blandness, it should be judged by the highest standards' John Walsh, Sunday Times
'That the book's contents are shocking is downright undeniable, but just as Bonfire of the Vanities exposed the corruption and greed engendered in eighties politics and high living, American Psycho examines the mindless preoccupations of the nineties preppy generation' Time Out
Review
"The first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes....[Ellis] is showing older authors where the hands have come to on the clock....He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novelists try for that anymore." Norman Mailer, Vanity Fair
Review
"Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer [and] American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel....The novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly....A seminal book." Fay Weldon, The Washington Post
Review
"American Psycho's social criticism is purely sophomoric horrifying only for its author's utter lack of narrative skill. To say that Ellis creates two-dimensional characters would be to flatter his understanding of human nature. (Grade: F)" Gene Lyons, Entertainment Weekly
Review
"This book is not pleasure reading, but neither is it pornography. It is a serious novel that comments on a society that has become inured to suffering." Library Journal
Synopsis
Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to a head-on collision with America’s greatest dream – and its worst nightmare – American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.