The Shards play fast and loose with various degraded literary modes - metafiction, autofiction. If you’ve never read a Bret Easton Ellis novel, starting here won’t hurt, but you might have even more fun if you first mainline the classics. If you hate Bret Easton Ellis novels this won’t persuade you otherwise. It’s hard to avoid the cliched poster-quote: if you like Bret Easton Ellis novels you’ll love this. It is lurid, grisly, violent, sexy, explicit, ambiguous, chill, funny, sad, and creepy, and so perfectly Bret Easton Ellis-y that at times it flirts with self-parody - which, one suspects, is very much the idea. Perhaps the only element that isn't constantly enjoyable here is the endless detail. The novel is also very aware of itself, and the writing shows that. Similarly, the story delves deep into what Bret sees as the performance of everyday life. But there is also a lot of humor, a deep, scathing look at privilege, and a very personal exploration of the things that haunt us, the way distrust affects us, and how sex, growing up, jealousy, fear, and obsession can shape the life of someone at the cusp of their teenage years. Parts of it reads like a crime novel and others like a very dark, sexualized, drug-infused coming-of-age story. Despite the multiplicity of intertwining narratives, Ellis masterfully keeps Bret at the center of everything and the narrator's voice, not to mention his growing paranoia, is more than enough to keep readers turning pages.

More than one narrative, Ellis weaves in and out of multiple stories.

Hermetic, paranoid, sleek, dark - and with brief explosions of the sex and violence that have characterized Ellis' oeuvre - The Shards is a stark reminder that the American Psycho author is a genre unto himself.

Bret easton ellis books