Are you a fan of 80s fiction? 90s fiction? True crime? Coming of age stories? Narratives that blend fact and fiction? This book by a member of the 80s literary Brat Pack is very dark and yet somehow compelling. Here’s my review of The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis.
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The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
Published on January 17, 2022 by Knopf. Thanks to the publisher for giving me an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
17-year-old Bret is a senior at an exclusive prep school when a new student arrives. A boy with a mysterious past.
Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle.
Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them–and Bret in particular–with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence.
The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation.
Can he trust his friends–or his own mind–to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.
What Else Has Bret Easton Ellis Written?
Ellis burst onto the literary scene at age 21 with Less Than Zero, an iconic Generation X book about a young, disaffected college student who parties, takes drugs and sleeps with men and women over winter break. The book featured a stream of consciousness narrative with a nihilistic bent. It was made into a 1987 movie starring Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz and Robert Downey, Jr.
He followed that with The Rules of Attraction in 1987, a book about three college students in a love triangle.
His best-known book is probably American Psycho, the story of a Wall Street trader/serial killer in 1991. This book was also made into a 2000 film starring Christian Bale, Chloe Sevigny, and Reese Witherspoon.
He followed that with a string of less well-known books: The Informers (1994), Glamorama (1998), Lunar Park (2005), Imperial Bedrooms (a return to the Less Than Zero characters in 2010).
The Shards is his first book in over thirteen years.
Review of The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
I was curious, yet apprehensive, about tackling this one.
I read Ellis’s first two books back in the day but found American Psycho much too gory and disturbing for me.
The Shards is also long. Like, really long. Less Than Zero was 200 pages. American Psycho was a (too long for me) 399 pages. The Shards was over 600 pages.
But the book’s 1980s setting and true crime elements had me intrigued.
Just a heads up: the descriptions of murder aren’t nearly as graphic and disturbing as those in American Psycho. But the animal abuse was described, and was an issue for me.
What Genre of Book is The Shards?
As I was reading, I was wondering exactly what kind of book The Shards was meant to be. Is it a memoir? No, but it playfully tries to make you think that is could be. The book is clearly inspired by Ellis’s upbringing in L.A. Both the author and the main character in The Shards are named Bret. Both attended the same high school. Both are working on a novel.
In addition, fictional Bret is very preoccupied with the actions of a mysterious serial killer, The Trawler.
The Trawler seems to be fictional himself, but is clearly inspired by some of the high-profile murderers who were operating in California in the late 1970s, like The Hillside Strangler and The Freeway Killer.
So: is The Shards true crime-inspired fiction? Is it a memoir? Is it just fiction?
I have seen the book described as “auto-fiction” (a blend of autobiography and fiction where fact and fiction are intentionally blended) which seems about right. I mean, in 2023, we all have “our truth,” which is not the same as objective truth, which is so pedantic.
The best way I can describe The Shards is that was the perfect thing to read when I was sick and on a lot of cold medication. The Guardian described it as a “fever dream” and I agree.
The Shards had the nihilism and drifty, rambling style of Less Than Zero combined with the creepiness of American Psycho.
What Did I Like About The Shards
In my opinion, if Bret Easton Ellis has a talent as a writer, it’s creating what the kids today call a “vibe.” Less Than Zero was a perfect depiction of unstructured Gen X latchkey kid life. Our parents weren’t helicopter parents, and we all took advantage of that. In American Psycho, Ellis took the 90s cultural obsession with the “wolves of Wall Street” and made one of them a literal predator.
The Shards felt like an amalgam of the two books. Much of the plot of The Shards is devoted to Bret’s mundane, disengaged 1981 teenage life. He goes to his private school. He hangs out with his girlfriend, Debbie, whom he likes but is not really attracted to, as he seems to be gay and conflicted about it.
Bret listens to 80s music. He obsesses about a fellow student named Matt, whom he is deeply attracted to and secretly hooking up with. Bret also ends up on the casting couch with his girlfriend’s father, who has promised to help get his novel published. It’s a very sad part of the book thatAnd the whole time, he is side-eyeing new student Robert Mallory. Bret claims to think that Robert is up to no good, but Bret’s fascination with him almost seems to feel like romantic obsession.
The entire narrative of The Shards is a fascinating blend of the mundane and the grotesque. Bret is a guy with plenty of issues himself, and at times I wondered if he was going to confess to being the Trawler. I won’t tell you how the book ends, and I don’t plan on a spoiler post, but if you have thoughts, feel free to leave them in comments or email me!
Great review. I agree with so much.
It bothers me, however, that The Trawler (spoiler)
is never revealed.
There is so much ambiguity.
Did Susan actually see a bite mark on Bret?
The book reminded me of that spate of movies in the early aughts that had crappy ambiguous endings.
I felt a bit shorted. It is
still a riveting book, and Bret absolutely brought back my own LA teenhood. My God, ..the locations! Such vivid detail, almost made me cry for that time. Those roads, canyons, restaurants, bars, malls.. My god the Malls.
But it got .. mushy there at the end.
was it Steven? Bret..? (I think not)
the Fiction teacher?
It actually keeps me up at night.
This (unresolved endings) seems to be more of a thing in crime fiction and many of us are NOT happy about it. In some cases, I think it’s to spark discussion. When a more literary author does it, maybe it’s because they are just not writing in the crime fiction lane.
This felt like a memoir to me, and it had to be somewhat autobiographical. I really do feel like Ellis is just using the 80s whole serial killer thing as a way to explore what it felt like to be a queer teen in the 80s, which must have been a whole other thing than it is now. Rebecca Makkai wrote what seems like a similar book, in which a novel that seemingly centered around a crime was more about the main character exploring her feelings of inadequacy and alienation as a teen. Odessa Moshfegh wrote a book like that too, the name of which I forgot.
That said, I am also a reader who likes closure in my crime fiction (and one who remembers 80s mall culture lol). As I read I was also thinking about suspects and also considered whether Bret could have done it. I agree, I think no. But my guess is that is just a random person, not someone mentioned in the book.