Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is the most demented novel I've ever read. The movie version starring Christian Bale came out back in 2000. I thought it was pretty good, also demented. It was good enough that I committed to getting and reading the novel. But anybody who knows me knows the levels of procrastination I'm willing to reach.

Years later and after finishing Homeland, I decide to finally read American Psycho. I've had this book for so long that the edges of the pages are slightly discolored. The book is everything I expected and more.

American Psycho is about Patrick Bateman, a yuppie Wall Street type who spends his days worrying about how his hair looks and his nights killing people. This dichotomy is the central aspect of the book. Bateman appears to all his fellow yuppies to be a perfectly normal (in their definition of the world) person. But in reality, he's a serial killer. The only problem is that nobody notices. Or nobody cares.

Though Bateman does talk about killing people occasionally, the first third of the book involves no murdering at all. You begin to see what an empty shell of a person Bateman is, but you don't see how brutal he can be. As the book continues, you see murders that start off relatively quick leading up to incredibly complex many day affairs that will leave even readers with the strongest stomachs feeling a little queasy.

Even though I'd like to get really deep into the many aspects of this book that I found interesting (the concepts of identity, perception, fantasy, etc.), I'd have to spoil parts of the book and it would be too long for anybody to bother reading. So let's get onto who this book is for.

I enjoyed American Psycho. The movie was great, though very violent and depraved. It was enjoyable and Christian Bale was great. But the book is definitely more brutal and more sexual. Certain chapters are basically porn. If they didn't end in death, I'd expect them to show up in Penthouse Letters. Other chapters describe torture and death so vividly that I didn't enjoy reading it in the traditional sense. It's not like reading about how Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas defeated hundreds of goblins in the battle at Helm's Deep. In that situation, the death is of inhumane beasts you aren't supposed to care about. In American Psycho, the deaths are brutal, demented, and awful. And even though you still don't really care about who dies, you feel bad simply because of how awful the situation is.

On top of the gore though, the prose itself will be difficult for some. It's told in the first person by a complete wacko who has a lot of idiosyncrasies. For instance, he has to describe the clothing of every single person he meets every time he sees them. As a result of this and other things, there are a lot of pages that drone on and on about seemingly random and inconsequential things. It's just par for the course when you are in the mind of a psychopath.

So in the end, I would not recommend this book to many of my friends. But those that don't mind a bit of gore and like seeing the very awful side of humanity, this book could be for you. If you loved the movie, it's certainly worth a read.

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