American Psycho

American Psycho was published in 1991 and is one of Bret Easton Ellis's novels of the period. It is written in the first person by Patrick Bateman, a wealthy and narcissistic Manhattan investment banker who describes his working day, his appearance, his colleagues and his crimes in the same tone, which is the effect the book is built on. Its own sources call it a horror novel as well as a literary one, and the violence in it is graphic and sustained rather than implied.

The novel's surface is brand names. Ellis reproduces the period in lists: what the characters wear, where they eat, which tape is playing, who has the better business card. Bateman's friends cannot reliably tell each other apart, and neither can he, and much of the book's comedy comes from how completely the social world is made of interchangeable surfaces. The chapters alternate between this routine and sequences of violence against people he has usually chosen for no reason at all, which is where the satire and the horror meet.

Readers and critics have argued about the book since publication, and the argument is usually about how much of the satire is carried by the prose and how much is simply asserted. It drew protests and has been censored in several countries, and it has since been adapted into a film, a stage musical and a graphic novel. Ellis has said the novel came out of the isolation and consumerist drift of his own life at the time rather than from a plan to take on Wall Street as a subject, and that the narrator started from a much more personal place than the high concept suggests.