Bret Easton Ellis, the novelist the 1980s couldn’t finish with

The question that has followed Bret Easton Ellis for most of his career is not what Patrick Bateman means — it is what it says about Ellis that he created him. American Psycho, the novel that Simon & Schuster dropped before publication in 1990, that women’s organizations petitioned to ban, that finally appeared in 1991 through Knopf’s Vintage imprint, is now taught in universities, staged at London’s Almeida Theatre, and about to be remade by Luca Guadagnino with a script by Scott Z. Burns. Ellis spent thirty years insisting that Bateman was not based on his father — he was based on Ellis himself. The literary establishment never quite forgave him for making that distinction.

He grew up in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley, a Los Angeles suburb where privilege and boredom occupied the same house. His parents divorced when he was eighteen. His father, a property developer whose temper and lifestyle Ellis would mine for decades, was the easy answer to the question of where Patrick Bateman came from. Ellis rejected that answer. He attended Bennington College in Vermont intending to study music, then discovered he could write — which turned out to be the more accurate damage assessment. His classmates included Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem. At twenty-one, still enrolled, he published Less Than Zero.

The novel was a portrait of rich, hollow young people in Los Angeles — cocaine parties, absent parents, nihilism as the local weather system. It sold immediately and positioned Ellis as a spokesperson for a generation that preferred to be called lost. He was grouped alongside Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz in the so-called Literary Brat Pack, a label he has spent considerable energy rejecting ever since. The Rules of Attraction followed in 1987, a campus novel with a blank chapter and a section written in French, experimenting with form in ways the Brat Pack label consistently obscured.

Then American Psycho. The protests began before the book existed. Simon & Schuster paid him an advance and then, weeks before publication, returned the manuscript. What arrived in bookstores in 1991 was a novel written in the first person by a Wall Street banker who described his designer wardrobe and his murders with identical affect. The point — that consumerism and violence shared an emotional register — was legible to most readers within the first twenty pages. The controversy, it turned out, was more about who Ellis was assumed to be than what the book actually argued.

This is worth stating plainly: American Psycho is one of the few novels in recent American literary history that the establishment tried to suppress and eventually canonized, often without acknowledging the contradiction. Ellis became the person the book was assumed to have come from. He spent years disputing this — the character was not his father, it was himself, drawn from a specific kind of pain he has described differently in each interview. That gap between the book and its reception, between the satirist and the subject he was assumed to satirize, is precisely what has kept American Psycho alive long after its specific targets — the Valentino suits, the business cards, the Wall Street of the late 1980s — have dated into period detail.

Glamorama, in 1998, was funnier and stranger — a satire of celebrity culture that opened into a terrorism thriller. Lunar Park, in 2005, put a character named Bret Easton Ellis at the center of a horror novel in which he is haunted by the ghost of Patrick Bateman. It won the International Horror Guild Award. Imperial Bedrooms, in 2010, returned to the Los Angeles of Less Than Zero and found everyone diminished, older, and more thoroughly corrupted. Then silence, for thirteen years.

The podcast arrived before the next book. Ellis launched the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast in 2013 and moved it to Patreon in 2018, developing a public reputation as a cultural contrarian whose political positions had drifted visibly from the literary world that had once claimed him. White, his 2019 essay collection, gathered those arguments and provoked exactly the kind of response American Psycho had provoked thirty years earlier — if from different quarters. The relationship between Ellis and the literary establishment, always uneasy, became openly hostile in new configurations.

The Shards arrived in 2023, his first novel in thirteen years. It began as a serialized audiobook for Patreon subscribers and was published as a full novel that January. Set in 1981 Los Angeles, it follows a fictionalized seventeen-year-old version of Ellis navigating prep school, desire, and the specific dread of a serial killer targeting his social circle. Long, atmospheric, and precise about how memory distorts the past even when you were present for it, The Shards was better received than any Ellis novel since American Psycho. Ryan Murphy signed on to adapt it for FX, with Igby Rigney playing the young Ellis, and Kaia Gerber and Evan Rachel Wood in supporting roles. The series premieres in August 2026.

Guadagnino’s remake of American Psycho is meanwhile in casting, with a new script by Scott Z. Burns and, according to Ellis, several high-profile actors already declining the Bateman role — unwilling, he suggests, to stand in Christian Bale’s shadow. Ellis himself is preparing Relapse, an original horror film he wrote and will direct, set in Los Angeles. At sixty-two, the writer who made a career of discomfort is discovering that making the images, rather than writing them, may be the only version of the story he hasn’t yet told.

Tags: Luca Guadagnino, novelists, ryan murphy