Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Now a major motion picture from Lion's Gate Films starring Christian Bale (Metroland), Chloe Sevigny (The Last Days of Disco), Jared Leto (My So Called Life), and Reese Witherspoon (Cruel Intentions), and directed by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol).

In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.

Rating : - Trite.
I opened this book understanding that there would be incredible sadism throughout the story. The book is titled "American Psycho," after all.

This book is neither interesting nor racy nor sexy as so many have claimed. It's trite and unbelievably obvious. Rather than reading a new chapter in American fiction it seemed as though I was reading the violent and sexual fantasies of an anti-social pubescent boy.

I agree fully with those who've already commented that those with any rudimentary knowledge of pyschological disorders will smirk and roll their eyes at this truly over-the-top potrayal of a violent sociopath. The truth is--dissociative or not--the character fails to actually follow any reasonable pyschological patterns and is therefore entirely unbelievable. Suspension of disbelief quickly turns into yawns and boredom after the third murder.

If Bret Ellis' purpose was merely to create something as shocking in violence and sex as he could, well...he potentially mastered this, but it doesn't make it any more interesting or literary. This is no literary masterpiece...it's "Twilight" for sadists.

Not to mention that nice little scene where Bateman meets his brother, a moment which segways nicely into another one of Ellis' novels. (Literary self-marketing, anyone?)

I forced myself to finish it believing that at some point it would get more interesting or creative...it didn't.

If you want something scary, creepy or original skip this trite trash. It only panders to the same audience Ellis' novels mock.