He was only 21 when he became the "voice of a generation." Honestly, that label usually ruins a writer. It creates this weird, frozen image of a person, like a fly in amber, forever stuck in 1985 with a skinny tie and a pile of cocaine. But for Bret Easton Ellis, it was just the starting gun for one of the most polarizing careers in American letters.
If you’ve only ever seen the Christian Bale memes or heard that Bret Easton Ellis books are just "misogynistic trash," you’re missing the actual point. These novels aren't just about violence. They are about the terrifying, numbing flatness of modern life. They are about how we use brands, movies, and music to fill the holes where our souls used to be.
The LA Nihilism of Less Than Zero
It started with Less Than Zero. Published in 1985, it’s a short, sharp shock of a book. Clay comes home from college for Christmas break in Los Angeles and finds... nothing. Everyone is beautiful, everyone is rich, and everyone is profoundly bored. They take Valium to feel normal and do harder things to feel anything else.
The prose is skeletal. It’s like a series of Polaroids taken at a party where the music is too loud and the lights are too bright. People always focus on the scene with the kid in the basement—and yeah, it’s grim—but the real horror is the apathy. "Disappear here" isn't just a billboard in the book; it's the entire philosophy of the characters.
Why The Rules of Attraction is secretly his best work
Many fans actually prefer his second book, The Rules of Attraction. Set at the fictional Camden College (a stand-in for Ellis's alma mater, Bennington), it’s a "he said, she said" carousel of unrequited love and drug-fueled parties. It’s funny. Kinda. In a dark, "I want to crawl into a hole" sort of way.
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Here’s a fun fact: Sean Bateman, one of the leads, is the brother of Patrick Bateman. The universe is connected. Characters drift in and out of different books like ghosts. It makes the whole bibliography feel like one long, interconnected nightmare of the American upper class.
The American Psycho explosion
Then came 1991. American Psycho.
The backlash was nuclear. Simon & Schuster dropped it. The National Organization for Women called for a boycott. People sent Ellis death threats. Why? Because the violence is graphic. It is pornographic in its detail. But if you actually read the book—and I mean really read it—you realize Patrick Bateman is a loser.
He’s not a "sigma male" or a cool anti-hero. He’s a pathetic, hollow man who cries because he can't get a reservation at Dorsia. He spends pages describing the exact fabric of a suit because he has no internal life. The murders might not even be happening; the book is so hallucinatory and unreliable that Bateman might just be having a very long, very violent mental breakdown in an office cubicle.
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The Meta-Turn: Lunar Park and The Shards
After Glamorama—which is basically American Psycho meets a James Bond movie on acid—Ellis went meta.
In Lunar Park, the main character is "Bret Easton Ellis." He’s a washed-up novelist living in the suburbs, haunted by the ghost of his father and the fictional Patrick Bateman. It’s a horror novel, but it’s also the most emotional thing he’s ever written. It deals with aging and the realization that the "bad boy" act can't last forever.
Then, after a long hiatus from fiction, he gave us The Shards in 2023. It’s a massive, 600-page "memoir" of his senior year in high school. It’s got a serial killer, yes, but it’s really about the end of the 70s and the beginning of the "Empire" era. It’s slow-burn dread. It’s the work of an older man looking back at his youth and seeing the cracks in the pavement he missed the first time around.
The Complete List of Bret Easton Ellis Books
If you're looking to dive in, here is the roadmap. Don't worry about the order too much, but it helps to see the evolution:
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- Less Than Zero (1985) – The debut that defined Gen X nihilism.
- The Rules of Attraction (1987) – Collegiate lust and misery.
- American Psycho (1991) – The ultimate satire of the 80s.
- The Informers (1994) – Interlinked short stories about LA vampires (literal and figurative).
- Glamorama (1998) – Models, terrorists, and the death of celebrity culture.
- Lunar Park (2005) – A meta-horror ghost story about fame and fathers.
- Imperial Bedrooms (2010) – The bleak sequel to Less Than Zero.
- White (2019) – His first nonfiction collection (and it's a prickly one).
- The Shards (2023) – A fictionalized look back at his teen years in 1981 LA.
What most people get wrong
The biggest misconception is that Ellis loves his characters. He doesn't. He’s a moralist in disguise. By showing the absolute worst of human behavior without a "lesson" at the end, he’s forcing the reader to provide the morality themselves. He’s holding up a mirror to a culture that values the price of a watch over the life of a person.
If you find the books disgusting, good. You're supposed to. They are a protest against a world that has become "post-everything."
How to actually read Bret Easton Ellis
If you’re new to this, don't start with American Psycho. It’s too much for a first date.
Start with Less Than Zero. It’s short. You can finish it in an afternoon. If you like the vibe—the detachment, the palm trees, the feeling that something is very wrong just out of frame—then move on to The Rules of Attraction. Save the heavy hitters for when you’ve adjusted to his frequency.
Actionable Insights for the Aspiring Reader:
- Check the "Bateman" connections: Keep an eye out for mentions of Camden College or recurring names like Mitchell Allen. It makes the reading experience way more rewarding.
- Listen to the soundtrack: Ellis always mentions specific songs. Making a playlist of the tracks in The Shards or Less Than Zero actually helps ground the "flat" prose in a real atmosphere.
- Look past the gore: In American Psycho, skip the chapters about Whitney Houston or Genesis if they bore you—but realize that those chapters are the actual "psycho" part. The obsession with trivia is the symptom of the disease.
The world of Bret Easton Ellis books isn't a comfortable place to live, but it's an essential part of the American literary landscape. It’s cold, it’s mean, and it’s occasionally very funny. Just don't expect a happy ending. Those don't exist in the Empire.