I’d never been a true believer that politics can solve the dark heart of humanity’s problems and the lawlessness of our sexuality,” Ellis muses, going full eighth-grader. The cashpoint machines at which he likes to stop to withdraw needlessly large sums start flashing non-standard messages at him. His murders become increasingly sadistic and complex, progressing from simple stabbings to drawn-out sequences of rape, torture, mutilation, cannibalism, and necrophilia, and his grasp on sanity begins to slip.

But his secondary — and still very substantial — crime is that he’s terribly dull, a man without a soul, with a festering sickness where his conscience should be. Yet it seems never to occur to Ellis, a man who is surely 70 percent dinner, that his friends are annoying the shit out of him not because they hold left-wing political views, but because, like him, they are rich, and rich people are universally horrible.Well, the images and descriptions of Patrick’s murders unsettled me as much as anything I have ever experienced. But Ellis’s true purpose in the remaining two hundred pages of White, a rambling mess of cultural commentary and self-aggrandizement, is to offend young, progressive readers while giving everyone else the delight of watching. After killing Paul Owen, one of his colleagues, Bateman appropriates Paul's apartment as a place to host and kill more victims.

is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. The lines blur so extensively that it’s possible to assume — and some have — that none of it is real, that it’s all a pornographic, violent power fantasy from a man who may not be a mass murderer or may not exist at all as anything other than a yuppie boogeyman, the worst of the worst.The book is paced in a slow-burn manner, juxtaposing Bateman’s methodic intellect with his abrupt, explosive judgment—an unreliable narrator having solely followed his own interpretation of situations. The events throughout the book and film paint Bateman’s path, leaving the reader to read attentively and reflect on modern-day criticisms of the social gap. Someone who claims to know Bateman later comments that he is incapable of picking up even an escort girl. norman mailer (who tried, and failed, to create an american psycho type book with his an american dream) complains that easton ellis offers no alternative to the 'flat, insipid' life of patrick bateman. Its provocative themes spark meaningful conversations and debates about society and individual responsibility.

The drawing of Patrick Bateman in this cover takes away his eyes, which shows his lack of conscience.Like so much of what we’ll be covering here, American Psycho revels and delights in its own artifice, in its plastic disposability, in the sense that not only does it not chronicle the world as we know it, but it describes a world that could not exist, that does not exist, that functions only as a commentary on pop culture and evil and spiritual emptiness and the dispiriting decadence of a ghoulish ruling class.