Screaming in a Dead Man's Ear 
 This was a book written by the young Ellis, the kid who was close to famous after 'Less than Zero'; or at least the diminished definition of 'famous' that applied to celebrities of the novelist kind and painters like Keith Haring and Basquiat. 'American Psycho' is as much a violent artistic gesture as it is a novel, an act of grand narrative destruction. As the machinery of story and language is hammered into twisted wreckage, and a new form emerges from the chaos, from the structural artifice before it... Ellis is suddenly and profoundly disgusted with the slick, polished, coke-dusted emptiness of Bull-market 80's living. All of it. All of them... the unanchored and swollen upper-middle-class he came from; waiting for someone to make them believers, or curse them. HIV came, and they just nodded, like it was an Old Testament judgement and not a retrovirus, like someone had it coming (but it sure as fuck wasn't them); and they were grateful for something to feel, a direction to worry at... groping and squinting at the darkness, seeking out vaguely apocalyptic shapes to justify the decadence, as if super-dense plutonium isotopes might add weight and mass to their empty hedonism. 
 American Psycho is Ellis screaming 'WAKE UP' in a dead man's ear. And you almost expect the milk-white eyes to open, because this book is LOUD. This is Ellis pointing an unloaded gun at people who don't believe they can die, pistol-whipping readers to show us we can bleed. He hates his peers for being living reflections of his own hollowed-out persona. He's just another walking corpse, going through the rituals of living, and slowly being liquefied by his own enzymes under a painted mask of youth and vitality and expensive cologne. 
 What makes it such powerful satire is the quieter comic absurdity hiding between the screaming and the Dahmeresque disassembling of the human form. The ridiculous power games and meaningless status symbols... the business cards, the restaurant reservations, the manicured physical perfection. A gold-plated culture; scratch the surface and you'll find the last generation's trash, compressed and deodorized and molded, then painted with gold. What passes for passion and creativity is Huey Lewis and Whitney Houston. Ponder that oblivion, and lament that the baby named WWIII was never born. 
 Eventually identity slips away, and 'friends' trade suits, apartments, women, faces, lives... because they're not sure what it is that makes them, 'them', and me, 'me'. In that context, serial killing is a desperate - and failed - existential gambit to reclaim the essence of Patrick Bateman Ellis.