Bret Easton Ellis

We must be closing in on peak carrying capacity for the planet, because it seems that authors are increasingly having a difficult time making up new names. Writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and our own Shannon Olson are giving their characters names that are really easy to remember–their own. Now Bret Easton Ellis has a book about a guy named Bret Easton Ellis, and it’s not a memoir. But it does draw upon Ellis’ life and previous novels for material, sometimes to highly creepy effect, as when a literary psychopath tries to act out the violent plot of the author’s American Psycho. This ghost story, set in a decaying and drug-addled suburbia, seems to find an older and wiser Ellis regretful about the topics (drugs, violence) his earlier works romanticized.