Lunar park

My current project of rereading all of Brett Easton Ellis's books, in order, has culminated in me devouring his latest Lunar Park in a matter of hours, this week.

It's absurdly good. It features the main character Bret Easton Ellis, a wildly-successful author who achieved notoriety and success at a very early age, who has spent the subsequent twenty years getting fucked up, and whose life with new wife and kids has now fallen virtually to pieces. Yes exactly -- it is literally autobiographical, at least in part.

The book also features characters from Ellis' work, namely Patrick Bateman, who generally terrorizes him and goes about in Brett's neighborhood recreating the murders and violence of American Psycho. (We know it's Bateman because the guy looks a bit like Christian Bale, who played Bateman in Mary Harron's film adaptation of Psycho.) He is also being menaced by at least one of his former selves, and his dead father, and a child's toy bird which he gave to his daughter and which may or may not actually be a grotesque monster from another world. So it's really some kind of meta-novel -- a Stephen King-style pulp-horror fused with a soap-opera he-said she-said couples-counselling marriage falling-apart drama, all bound up in the sort of post-modern self-referential hyperreal structure that frankly I don't believe anyone but this author could get away with.

At some point Ellis observes that these terrors only exist because he -- at some point or another -- wrote them into existence; he immediately sets about penning a quick short story about the demise of Patrick Bateman, trying to write him out of existence again. It doesn't work.

I don't want to say any more and, besides -- you won't want me to give it all away, will ya; you'll want to find out for yourself. I have a feeling that I did the right thing in reading all his books in sequence before attacking Lunar Park; his habit of referencing and reviving characters from other works in new books is taken to an illogical extreme here and it helps somewhat to have, for example, every gory detail of Patrick Bateman's bloody rampages fresh in mind. Like I said, though -- absurdly, precociously good.

Some further reading:

Brett Easton Ellis in Wikipedia.
post-Lunar Park interview at The Morning News.
Brett Easton Ellis at e-Notes.
Video of interview on BBC.
Story about Lunar Park and BEE on Chuck Palahnuik's site.