(another update incorporating comments about BEE's latest novel - apparently he's still at it!) 
 Before we start - a quote by Norman Mailer about Bret Easton Ellis : "How one wishes this writer was without talent!" 
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 People think the pages and pages of descriptions of hacking and chopping up women are ironic. 
 Well, in one sense they are, but in another sense they aren't. 
 People who like this book should ask themselves why they want to read pages and pages of descriptions of hacking and chopping up women (with the occasional man thrown in, but all the lavish descriptions with rats and nail guns and so on are just for the ladies). 
 I don't think people can tell what's misogynistic and what isn't any more. 
 Here's a real life anecdote. A couple of years ago I went into Waterstones in downtown Nottingham, and mooched around. In this shop (probably others too) the staff had put various books on display with their own handwritten enthusiastic recommendations underneath. Well, that was nice, I liked reading them, until I came to the handwritten card under American Psycho. It said something along the lines of : "after a night of getting knocked back by various women in Nottingham hostelries, what better than to pick up Bret Easton Ellis's 80s classic and get some of my own back". Wow! That was a little like a guy working for Waterstone's recommending "Commandant of Auschwitz" by Rudolph Hoess, with the comment "After a day of having to deal with members of the Jewish community, what better than to sink into an armchair with this book, and get some of my own back". Believe it or not, my GR friends, I actually wrote a protest email to the manager, who wrote back with an apology and said he'd removed the tasteless comments. 
 You know, this book reveals how much of a different planet some people are on than the one I'm on. It's not a good feeling. 
 UPDATE : FROM THE PAGES OF YESTERDAY'S SUNDAY TIMES 
 there's this review of "Imperial Bedrooms" which is BEE's latest novel. The reviewer is Theo Tait, I never head of him and it isn't an anagram of Paul Bryant, and I am not Theo Tait, let's get that clear. So imagine how the following remarks warmed the cockles of my heart: 
 At 400 pages, American Psycho is probably unfinishable except by adolescents and sociopaths...[Imperial Bedrooms:] descends into a phantasmagoria involving torture, online snuff videos and the appalling abuse of prostitutes and rent boys. Ellis claims to be a moralist, by which I guess he means that it is the emptiness of the modern world that causes his characters to behave in a spectacularly louche and/or homicidal fashion. But as with many satirists, it is unclear whether he is criticising the horrors he depicts, or simply wallowing in them. Either way, Ellis's determination to rub the reader's face in the gore carriessome heavy costs. Many people have no strong desire to read sustained passages of pornographic and misogynistic violence, in which, for instance, masked men urinate on a bound actress...[other examples omitted:]... these sequences also chip away at the novel's realistic texture and leave you wondering if Imperial Bedrooms has any meaning beyond that of the average slasher film.