Reviews with content warning for Hate crime - American Psycho

Reviews tagging 'Hate crime'

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

132 reviews

nikolemrtnz's review against another edition

challenging dark funny tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I'm never reading this book again, it made me so much. I did enjoy it though, which I can't believe. The main character is disgusting but so interesting and I like the social commentary.

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mangooo_spagetti's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Slow paces book that does everything it’s trying to do. Reading this book also has dropped my rating of the movie significantly, both because of it’s failure to convey the fact the Patrick Bateman is not cool, and for it’s decontextualized ending. They made the movie into a thing that has a beginning, middle, and end of a story, wheras the book is more of something with movements. Like an orchestra. The first introduces you to his life and is by far the funniest, which fades gracefully into the second, the longest and most brutal. The second begins with his killing Paul Allen, and the American psycho movie does that just fine. But the thing the movie is missing is the third. The third movement where patrick bateman shows us just how crazy he is, and gets more delusional, and the story more fragmented and experimental. The clear image of this wallstreet buisnessman who wants so desperately for people to see how crazy he is, and how terrible of a person he is, but either he doesnt do anything and just sits there delusional dreaming about how such a terrible world would not care. Or they genuinely dont notice or care.

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phibs's review against another edition

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dark funny reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Bret Easton Ellis constructs a completely believable world in which characters blindly and vapidly consider their wants first, regardless of circumstance. Characters are made interchangeable, all entirely selfish, two-dimensional yuppies in a grim satire of 1980s Wall Street consumerism.

Although Ellis manages to deftly weave grim comedy throughout, his postmodernist critique remains explicitly crude and vile, leading the reader to question how necessary Ellis’ innumerable graphic depictions of wanton violence against women were to the narrative at large.

Director Mary Harron certainly cherrypicks the best of Ellis’ novel to adapt for cinema, leaving the novel little more than a compendium of desensitised butchery and $300 ceviches.

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brennahinshaw's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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suchsweetsorrow89's review against another edition

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dark funny mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

everyone in the reviews praises this book for being a masterpiece with just a few "minor issues." i can say with the utmost confidence that this book is a horrible and disgusting text altogether, so it's lucky to get even three stars from me.

though i understand that ellis deliberately makes it so that this book is satirically exaggerated to emphasize bateman's character (as a reflection of our own), the oversaturation of these moments (which he constantly relies on throughout the text, even at moments when it is not needed) come across as if a 12-year-old is telling the same joke over and over again until it just becomes the same. mindless. punchline. on top of that, the overuse of slurs when ellis actually didn't need to use them at all comes across as lazy character-building (and this is only emphasized by his explicit statement that he doesn't care if he's "canceled" for using the slurs when interviewers brought it up). you can always show a bad character is a bad person without depicting him beating up the homeless over and over, using slurs when not needed, and adding in filler scenes of overt antisemitism that could have been easily erased and made the same points (and made the book more powerful, in my opinion).

though the gore seemed to draw on society's fascination with gore and all things horror (as well as sex), 400 pages of this very particular fascination in the kind of "rinse and repeat" style results in something that loses its significance, dulling and eating in on itself as it goes on.

frankly, i do not know whether i recommend this book. though the ending was actually quite good (and guess what? it did it WITHOUT 4 paragraphs of intense misogyny and hate crimes every five pages! wow- shocker) the oversaturation with which ellis relies on obscures the meaning entirely, almost watering the point down in places where it could have been a memorable text. however, if you want to read it, please take the trigger warnings seriously— and i suggest an audiobook as an aid from pages 60-360, since the middle really isn't worth your time or really worth any meaningful pen-to-page analytical thoughts.

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lynxpardinus's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective tense

4.0

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_kaylinconn's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

I find it very difficult to rate this because I definitely did not enjoy reading it. However, I can’t rate it poorly because the things that it did, I understand and respect. I think for what the author was trying to accomplish, he did it well. There are things here and there that I’d nitpick, but I understand the purpose they serve nonetheless.

But I don’t feel as though I could rate this higher then a 3-3.5, because it’s content is so foul. Which I know I signed up for, but none of this was enjoyable.

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