Recommendations
Books Like American Psycho
Best books to read after American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is a controversial satire of 1980s Wall Street excess — Patrick Bateman, a banker who may or may not be murdering people in his spare time. These recommendations extend the experience through Ellis's other novels and through literary fiction about consumer culture, masculine violence, and American emptiness.
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Buy on AmazonLess Than Zero
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis's debut novel — the same blank affect and brand-name saturation in 1980s Los Angeles; a natural first read before American Psycho, or a tonal companion after.
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Buy on AmazonGlamorama
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis's fourth novel — a male model drawn into international terrorism; shares American Psycho's obsession with surfaces, celebrity, and the violence concealed beneath them.
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Buy on AmazonThe Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe's satirical novel of the same Wall Street milieu — the panoramic, satirical counterpart to American Psycho; less extreme in its violence but covering the same social world with the same contempt.
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Buy on AmazonYou
by Caroline Kepnes
A stalker novel narrated by the stalker — the nearest contemporary relative to American Psycho in its use of first-person narration by a character who is a predator, with the same dark humor about consumer culture.
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Buy on AmazonBright Lights, Big City
by Jay McInerney
McInerney's cocaine-and-nightclub novel of 1980s Manhattan — the second-person novel of the same era and milieu, without the violence but with the same sense of a generation hollowed out by its own appetites.
- 6Buy on Amazon
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The original first-person monologue by a man who has reasoned himself into total alienation — the nineteenth-century predecessor to Patrick Bateman's 1980s version of the same condition.
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Buy on AmazonLolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's novel narrated by a pedophile and murderer who presents himself with self-justifying elegance — the literary fiction precedent for American Psycho's technique of giving a monster a seductive voice.
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Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's novel about violence on the Texas-Mexico border — the serious literary fiction parallel to American Psycho's engagement with violence as a structuring principle of American life.
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