A review by heartstrings
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
4.0
The best way I can review this beast is to cut it up into two parts. The first part is Bret Easton Ellis fanfiction in where Ellis writes a fictionalized version of his prep school senior year where he’s exceptionally good in bed, is very popular, and all the girls want him. That story is fairly mediocre tbh.
The second part is a slowly looming queer horror - an intense and engaging portrait of a young man trapped in a gilded cage and suffocated by the closet his sexuality has forced him into in early 1980’s America. It’s this haunting side of the tale full of mutilated corpses, gaslighting intruders, coercive predators, and clueless hets that really sets this book apart. The unraveling of Ellis’ character is inevitable, but what feels even more poignant is the way in which said character becomes unhinged - less because people are dying around him and more so because with every day that goes by he’s lost to the numbness of drugs and malaise he’s created for himself to stamp out the despair he feels at not being able to be his authentic self.
The second part is a slowly looming queer horror - an intense and engaging portrait of a young man trapped in a gilded cage and suffocated by the closet his sexuality has forced him into in early 1980’s America. It’s this haunting side of the tale full of mutilated corpses, gaslighting intruders, coercive predators, and clueless hets that really sets this book apart. The unraveling of Ellis’ character is inevitable, but what feels even more poignant is the way in which said character becomes unhinged - less because people are dying around him and more so because with every day that goes by he’s lost to the numbness of drugs and malaise he’s created for himself to stamp out the despair he feels at not being able to be his authentic self.