A review by bean
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
4.0
This had been a book that I'd been meaning to get to out of curiosity. I knew it was going to be very hateful and graphic but truly even then I had nooo idea what I was getting myself into. That being said, I found it a fascinating read. I didn't derive any pleasure from it, but I think on a craft level, it's an interesting thing to read and dissect. How Ellis used the first person narrator, how he structured the story, and how he then broke those conventions were done with purpose. The way tension builds throughout the novel as the main character gets worse really makes you feel like you're going insane, and by the end the entire ordeal is so harrowing. It's cold, it's shocking, it's brutal.
That being said, it's still too long. It's too repetitive. With the level of gore involved, I can't say that it ever became indulgent, but the sheer volume of it does get exhausting. You have to ask yourself, why this much? On some level, I get the significance of each murder, but also I must question why they were all so graphic and at what point the lengthy explanations became a novelty instead of fulfilling any real purpose.
I really don't recommend this book to anyone. For all the skill of craft, there's nothing that you can learn from this book that you can't learn anywhere else without the graphic sexual, violent, racist, sexist, and homophobic depictions. I know multiple people who couldn't make it through this book and I absolutely do not blame them. I can attribute my success in finishing the book to two main things- my mind's eye is very weak so I don't picture things very clearly when I read and I accidentally stumbled onto some really fucked up and graphic stuff at a young age when I was on Wattpad so I've built up some tolerance for it. It's really not worth it.
That being said, it's still too long. It's too repetitive. With the level of gore involved, I can't say that it ever became indulgent, but the sheer volume of it does get exhausting. You have to ask yourself, why this much? On some level, I get the significance of each murder, but also I must question why they were all so graphic and at what point the lengthy explanations became a novelty instead of fulfilling any real purpose.
I really don't recommend this book to anyone. For all the skill of craft, there's nothing that you can learn from this book that you can't learn anywhere else without the graphic sexual, violent, racist, sexist, and homophobic depictions. I know multiple people who couldn't make it through this book and I absolutely do not blame them. I can attribute my success in finishing the book to two main things- my mind's eye is very weak so I don't picture things very clearly when I read and I accidentally stumbled onto some really fucked up and graphic stuff at a young age when I was on Wattpad so I've built up some tolerance for it. It's really not worth it.