![]() ![]() ![]() The Shards reads like a Karl Ove Knausgård novel spliced with a Dario Argento movie. A devotee of genre shlock, he characteristically weaves a lurid serial killer plotline into his high school Künstlerroman. What follows, we gather, is to be the origin story of a lifelong shadow.Ī pleasingly slippery, impish author, Ellis uses all the up-to-date autofictional techniques to far more exciting effect than, say, Ben Lerner’s superficially tasteful and objectionably dull novel The Topeka School. Bret acknowledges the “prince-of-darkness literary persona” readers ascribe to him as “the man who wrote American Psycho”, but insists that “had never been the intended pose”. The story proper begins with the audacious ruse of “Bret Easton Ellis” looking metafictionally back across time at the defining events that befell him and his friends in the autumn of 1981, during their final year in high school. T he shocks come fast in Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in 13 years: The Shards is prefaced by a sweetly sincere – or is it? – thank you note from the notoriously misanthropic author “for your support over the past four decades… I’m more appreciative than you’ll ever know”. ![]()
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