The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis
The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis
4 Rating(s)
List: $32.50 | Sale: $22.75
Club: $16.25

The Shards
A novel

Bestseller

Author: Bret Easton Ellis

Narrator: Bret Easton Ellis

Unabridged: 23 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/17/2023


Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A novel of sensational literary and psychological suspense from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged high school friends in a vibrantly fictionalized 1980s Los Angeles as a serial killer strikes across the city

“A thrilling page turner from Ellis, who revisits the world that made him a literary star with a stylish scary new story that doesn't disappoint.” –Town & Country

Bret Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

Seventeen-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 equaled 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—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision. 

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A., The Shards is 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. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.

About The Author

BRET EASTON ELLIS is the author of six novels, a collection of essays, and a collection of stories, which have been translated into thirty-two languages. He lives in Los Angeles and is the host of the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast available on Patreon.


Reviews

bret: i've connected the two dots me: you din't connect shit disclaimer: i did not like this book and my review reflects of that. if you loved this book or if you are a diehard ellis fan, skip this review, don't @ me telling me i’m wrong for disagreeing with you or that everything that i didn't like......more

Goodreads review by Meike on January 12, 2023

This utterly absorbing pseudo-autofictional variation on Less Than Zero with thriller and un-true crime elements as well as an abundance of sex scenes reads like an over-the-top historical novel about the 80's - it's an eccentric pageturner and great, smart fun! Our protagonist and narrator is one B......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on March 01, 2024

The author opens up with a section telling how it’s taken him some forty years to write this book. It is, he says, based on events he witnessed; acts of violence perpetrated on people he knew, friends. He says that he’d tried to write the book years ago but at that time the act of recalling events h......more

Goodreads review by casey on March 17, 2024

(3/17/2024 reread) listen i loooove marinating in a long ass book told from the perspective of someone who irl would be Absolutely Insufferable. the second time around this is just as good. there’s so much you pick up on that makes it just as gripping and exciting even though you know how it’s going......more

Goodreads review by Emmanuel on November 17, 2023

3.75* rounded-up. Not sure what prompted me to buy this book… I was never a big fan of BEE; his transgressive novels didn’t quite resonate with me (my vote goes to JG Ballard); but then again this was some time ago (almost 20 years!), so I said lets give it another go. Familiar themes: L.A. setting......more


Quotes

“Ellis is a true literary craftsman, and the novel’s imagery is lush and gorgeous . . . there is an exciting new vulnerability in Ellis’s latest book, inviting the reader more profoundly into the emotional realm of the protagonist than he has with his previous characters.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“It’s been a dozen years since Bret Easton Ellis published a novel. And his latest, The Shards . . . is 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.” —NPR

“Cleverly done . . . eerie . . . The Shards establishes a tricky two-step of sincerity and unreliability.”The Wall Street Journal
 
“The teen narrator is perversely endearing, through the sheer force of his striving and unreliability . . . Here, for sure, is a horror story of the 80s.” Air Mail

"A thrilling page turner from Ellis, who revisits the world that made him a literary star with a stylish scary new story that doesn't disappoint.” Town & Country

“[Ellis] ups the ante in several ways: he depicts a lavish lifestyle fueled by money and privilege, explores his own fluid sexuality (and that of some of his friends), and adds a lurid story of home invasions and murders (one victim is a high school friend). In effect, he mashes up Less Than Zero with American Psycho . . . As Ellis explores the theme of lost innocence, he demonstrates his skill as a storyteller.” Publishers Weekly

"A surprisingly seductive work of erotic horror . . . [Ellis] ably captures how Bret’s paranoia intensifies out of that emotional distance and how the urge for feeling and connection infects and warps his personality. Bret Ellis the character is trying to play it cool, but Bret Easton Ellis the author knows just how much he’s covering up.” Kirkus Reviews

“Breathtaking . . . a compulsively readable novel informed by suspense . . .  The setting is beautifully realized not only by its evocation of place, but also by its myriad references to popular music of the day. Sometimes horrifying, sometimes nostalgic and even poignant, Ellis’s latest is an unqualified success.”Booklist [Starred Review]