A novel by Bret Easton Ellis about wealthy, dissolute Californian teens with a possible serial killer lurking in the shadows? Have we been catapulted through an ’80s worm-hole?
The Shards, the eighth novel from the American Psycho writer and his first since 2010’s Imperial Bedrooms, covers familiar ground but Ellis has shifted the sands under his golden teens’ penny-loafered feet.
It’s autumn 1981, and 17-year-old Bret Ellis is a senior at a posh prep school, who talks airily of writing his first novel (Less Than Zero, no less, the real-life author’s own debut), while focusing his seemingly infinite spare time on drug-fuelled parties, the weedy end of ’80s new wave, and fancying his close male friends.
But then new student Robert shows up and Bret begins to wonder if the newcomer might be a murderer. As you do. A serial killer, the Trawler, has suddenly become very active and Bret senses a connection.
Ellis’s persuasive writing makes that leap seem less improbable and his conjuring of the ’80s is vivid. There are faults with The Shard, but they’re mostly forgivable. Ellis reworks and rehashes scenes and angles like an anxious man picking at a scab.
And there are those famously long sentences that really shouldn’t work but do – Ellis envelops the reader with his language while simultaneously injecting us with unease. How much of what happens in The Shards is truth or fiction. Why does he so love making his readers feel queasy? And is Ellis really the killer? Paul Connolly
The verdict ★★★★✩
An enjoyable, epic slab of enthralling 1980s drama positively infested with the heebie-jeebies
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