Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis

 

In Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis turns the scalpel inward, dissecting not only his persona but the legacy of his fiction. The novel opens with the style of an autobiography, recounting his meteoric rise to literary stardom at the age of 23, following the publication of Less Than Zero. Hollywood came calling (the novel was adapted into a film starring Robert Downey Jr.), and Ellis was soon anointed a literary figurehead of the so-called Brat Pack, chronicler of the hollow glamour and nihilistic indulgence that marked the Reagan era. With American Psycho and Glamorama, he established a signature style drenched in sex, drugs, and a nihilism sharpened into satire.

But Lunar Park is not content to remain a memoir. Soon, the narrative shifts into haunted territory. Fictional Ellis, living in a suburban McMansion with an actress named Jayne Dennis and their children (one his biological son, the other not), finds himself stalked by the ghost of his estranged father. Even more chilling: Patrick Bateman, the murderous antihero of American Psycho, appears to have escaped the confines of fiction. A toy bird named Terby (read it backwards and it says “Y, Bret”) becomes a malevolent force. The line between metafictional satire and supernatural horror blurs.

At times, this genre-bending maneuver is thrilling. Ellis toys with Stephen King-esque motifs like haunted houses, vengeful spirits, psychological unraveling but never fully commits to the terror such themes demand. The novel becomes a curious hybrid: equal parts self-parody, literary therapy, and horror homage.

Ellis has said he intended to write a “Stephen King novel,” but Lunar Park lacks King’s emotional stakes and his finely tuned suspense mechanics. Instead, the narrative often detours into Ellis’s personal obsessions like his complicated relationship with fame, with the excesses of his earlier success. While these confessions can be affecting, they sometimes feel like footnotes masquerading as plot.

Perhaps the most compelling moments arrive when Ellis confronts the shadow of his own past work. He distances himself from the grotesque violence of American Psycho, writing, “I had moved past the casual carnage that was so prevalent in the books I'd conceived in my twenties, past the severed heads and the soup made of blood and the woman vaginally penetrated with her own rib.”

It’s a self-aware reckoning, and yet, one that risks alienating the very readers who admired him for precisely that visceral bravado.

Indeed, Ellis’s strength has always been his cool detachment and his hyper-aware social commentary qualities that don’t easily mesh with the demands of horror fiction. When the narrative reveals Bateman to be a mere copycat killer, one senses the novel backing away from its own possibilities. What could have been an unnerving collision of metafiction and terror instead settles into something less: a ghost story wrapped in autobiography, unsure whether to haunt or to confess.

Still, Lunar Park is not without its positives. There is bravery in Ellis’s willingness to mine his personal mythology and twist it into fiction. The novel is at its best when it acknowledges its own lie, its own vulnerability. Readers familiar with Ellis’s works will find much to unpack, but newcomers may find the layering of reality and fantasy more confusing than brilliant.

In the end, Lunar Park is an ambitious, uneven experiment-half memoir, half horror, and entirely Ellis. It may not reinvent the genre, but it reminds us that even literary geniuses must one day face the ghosts they’ve invented.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Best appreciated with knowledge of Ellis’s earlier works. Approach with curiosity and set aside any expectations of Stephen King.

This was from a book review I wrote for my Multiply blog in 2007.