American Psycho: Bret Ellis

Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to a head-on collision with America's greatest dream - and its worst nightmare - American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront. 'American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel . . . The novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly . . . A seminal book' Fay Weldon, Washington Post 'The first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes . . . Ellis is showing older authors where the hands have come to on the clock' Norman Mailer, Vanity Fair 'Serious, clever and shatteringly effective . . . For its savagely coherent picture of a society lethally addicted to blandness, it should be judged by the highest standards'.