The Shards
Bret Easton Ellis"Worth the wait. Hermetic, paranoid, sleek, dark - and with brief explosions of the sex and violence that have characterized Ellis' oeuvre — The Shards is a stark reminder that the American Psycho author is a genre unto himself... " - Gabino Iglesias, NPR
Los Angeles, 1981 -17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives 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 equalled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence.
"It is lurid, grisly, violent, sexy, explicit, ambiguous, chill, funny, sad, and creepy, and so perfectly Bret Easton Ellis-y that at times it flirts with self-parody - which, one suspects, is very much the idea...The Shards play[s] fast and loose with various degraded literary modes... [it] is queasily gripping, strikingly heartfelt, and a whole lot of fun." - Alex Bilmes, Esquire
Gripping, sly, suspenseful, and deeply haunting, The Shards is nostalgically set against a pre-Less Than Zero L.A.backdrop. A mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at seventeen - sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.