After seeing the movie a few people told me that I have to find the book and read it as soon as possible.
I had heard it was a very dark book and I started reading expecting nothing too shocking. Boy was I wrong. I am not disturbed easily by things but some of the detail that Ellis goes into with this book is very eerie. From the get go this book starts off dark and never quits. Ellis does great job making a satire of the 80's culture and lifestylel. I highly recommend this book but be prepared it can get very graphic.
__________________ The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
I just finished the book and I have mixed feelings. I like the perspective it takes on the 80s lifestyle. But at the same time, I found the book to be really repetetive and tasteless. Even though Im sure Ellis wrote that way deliberately, I felt like it got old fast and the book as a whole was very underwhelming.
I'm reading the book right now and I see what you mean (I'm about a hundred pages in).
I'm a huge fan of the movie, which I think is great/amazing, but the book seems far more drawn out (ie: explaining what everyone is wearing in WAY too vivid detail all the time).
Sorry to bring this back, but I have to put in my two cents because I just finished reading this a week or two ago.
First of all - This was a great book to me. Maybe not the same greatness as some classic book that a high schooler should read for his or her senior English class, but it definitely appealed to me more than any book I've recently read. It could be because I saw the movie first so I had a lot of visuals already put in my head (Ex. - I imagined Patrick Bateman as Christian Bale and Evelyn as Reese Witherspoon).
Aside from all of that bullsh*t (I seem to keep getting off track) - I f*cking loved it. I loved the pure morbidity of it, and yeah - I agree with you all that have said how disturbing it was because of the amount of detail that Ellis would go into when describing the way Patrick would murder or torture people. Everything was so detailed, and I loved it. I could imagine everything so easily, except for when he'd describe what everyone was wearing. I don't know shit about business suits or fashionable wear for women back in the 80s, so I'd quickly skim through all of that.
Sometimes it'd be kind of a relief to read something besides Patrick brutally killing someone. The little side story with him and Jean in a restaurant and talking about Jean being in love with him was a nice breath of fresh air from all of the eye gouging, limb ripping, and flesh cooking. Ellis did a great job fitting this in because it gave the book a balance to me and it also developed Patrick's character more by showing his not-so-"f*ck-you" side and explaining how Jean saw the Patrick Bateman she was in love with. ...Or maybe it's just cos I'm a girl that I found that part to be real nice.
Either way, this was the most entertaining book I've read in a while. I literally couldn't put it down sometimes.
As far as the movie goes, I still enjoy it but now that I watch it, I feel like things are being left out and everything is going unexplained. I loved how much the book explained, and in the movie when Patrick tells his lawyer over the phone that he's killed "40, maybe 50 people" or something - I was kind of like, "What? No f*cking way." cos the movie didn't really suggest he killed more than who we did see him kill except for one or two times. But in the book, that line had much more to back it up because it does seem like he kills one person after another. I liked that the movie used a bunch of direct dialogue from the book and it seems like the director wanted to stick to the book as much as possible while doing a little twisting of her own.
My only question is: What the hell was up with the sudden third person point of view in the part when the cops are chasing him??
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Hello bebe.
Last edited by PONG_MASTER on Jul 26th, 2007 at 02:48 PM
i loved american psycho...the portrayal of someone with so obvious an obsessive compulsive disorder is staggering...
this is evident not so much in bateman's descriptions of the violence but the peripherals...what camera he uses with what lens and what type of tape and at what speed.
the chapters of huey lewis and the news etc also show the characters sheers obsessive personality
obviously the scenes of violence are astounding also but i dont think this defines the book in the way that the media hyped it to be at the time of its release some 13 years ago
if you are a fan of the book you should check out what is essentially a sequel to it...Lunar Park...which is a far more balanced and better written book
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You have to look beyond the gore, it serves a purpose, true, but there is a hidden message, a very ironic, darkly funny satire embedded within it. The film was funny!
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Jan 18th, 2007 04:12 AM
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