Reading Order
American Psycho Reading Order
American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis is a novel narrated by Patrick Bateman — a twenty-six-year-old investment banker at Pierce & Pierce in Manhattan, living the privileged, interchangeable, brand-saturated life of his Wall Street cohort, and (in the novel's version of events) committing grotesque murders in his spare time. The novel was refused by its original publisher (Simon & Schuster) and released by Vintage, to immediate controversy; it was banned in Queensland, Australia and sparked a feminist boycott. But it has been reappraised as a serious novel — a satire of consumer capitalism and masculine violence in which the murders may be real or may be Bateman's fantasy, and in which the horror lies partly in the fact that no one around him notices either way.
Where to start
American Psycho (1991)
Complete American Psycho Book List
- 1Buy
American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis·1991 - 2Buy
Less Than Zero
Bret Easton Ellis·1985·Ellis's debut — a college student returns to Los Angeles for the holidays and observes his wealthy peers' emptiness; the same blank affect and designer-brand saturation, less violent. - 3Buy
Glamorama
Bret Easton Ellis·1998·Ellis's next major novel — a male model drawn into a world of international terrorism; more plot-driven than American Psycho but similarly organized around surfaces and violence.
American Psycho — Frequently Asked Questions
Is American Psycho too violent to read?
American Psycho contains very graphic violence. The violent scenes are interspersed with extended passages of designer-brand enumeration and Wall Street social comedy, and many readers find the novel readable by skimming the violent chapters. The question of whether the murders are real (within the fiction) is never definitively resolved by the novel.
Is American Psycho a serious novel or just violent provocation?
Both — Ellis intended the violence as a response to the violence of capitalist culture, and the novel works as a satire of 1980s Wall Street excess in which the murders are the logical extension of the commodity fetishism that surrounds them. It has been widely taught in university literature courses and is included in serious literary discussions of the period.
Was American Psycho adapted into a film?
Yes — Mary Harron directed a film adaptation in 2000, starring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman. The film is widely considered excellent, significantly less graphic than the novel, and more darkly comic in tone. It was a critical success and has become a cult classic.
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