Bloody Hell (American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Date:	15/06/00 (21 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Black humor.

Disadvantages: The message is a little too well-signposted.

Clawing its way back into the bestseller lists after the release of the movie adaptation, this book is probably the best guide to the ethical ecology of Ronald Reagan's America: greed as a creed. Greed for money, greed for status, and greed for power. Greed made flesh in the shape of the Über-yuppie Patrick Bateman, whose psychopathy and solipsism equip him perfectly for success in the eat-or-be-eaten, piss-on-or-be-pissed-on jungle created by Reagan's economic policies.
Bateman leads a double life, both based on manic, amoral consumption. In one life he consumes the luxuries available to the rich and successful in the bars and nightclubs of 1980s New York; in the other he consumes the bodies of young women, torturing, killing, and mutilating prostitutes and girlfriends in a variety of ever more ingenious and harrowing ways.
And that, of course, is why the book is so famous (and so widely read): *American Psycho* is still being attacked by feminists for encouraging misogyny and the murder of women. The attacks overlook the fact that Bateman whets his appetite for the destruction of women by destroying men: poor and homeless ones. As Alan Moore has put it: "Power is poison". This isn't the best literary exploration of that theme, but it's certainly the book that all other modern explorations of it have to measure themselves against.

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