Bret Easton Ellis’s characters have ranged from serial killers to drug dealers to models/terrorists. Now he is tackling maybe his strangest character yet: himself.
In his new book, “Lunar Park,” Ellis writes about a writer, named Bret Easton Ellis, who is thrust into the limelight early in life and spends the following years living in a blur of wealth, drugs and fame. He settles down for a family life, marrying his (fictional) actress ex-girlfriend and taking care of their son and her daughter. Then, a series of strange events unfold, which appear to have a connection to Bret’s past and the death of his father.
“It’s a ghost story. It’s a haunted house. It was my homage to a genre of fiction that I enjoyed as a kid: supernatural stuff. It’s an homage to Stephen King. It’s a kind of mid-career retrospective. It’s a lot of things, I guess,” he said.
Ellis, whose works include “American Psycho,” “Less Than Zero” and “The Rules of Attraction,” said people are sometimes scared of him because of the graphic sex and violence depicted in his novels.
“Should they be scared of me? Yes – but for a whole list of other reasons,” he said.
Ellis found success at a young age with his first novel “Less Than Zero,” published while he was still a college student at Bennington College in Vermont. “Less Than Zero” and his following two books, “The Rules of Attraction” and “American Psycho,” have been made into movies, and two others have been optioned.
“(Having books turned into films) is exciting, even when they don’t turn out well. I love movies, and so to see one of your books turned into a film, that’s an exciting thing,” he said.
“American Psycho,” in both film and novel form, has achieved a cult status that Bret said he finds overwhelming at times, like when people come up to him at signings with pictures of their costumes of Patrick Bateman, the serial killer protagonist. For this reason, Ellis had Bateman make appearances in some of his other novels.
“He haunts me. His popularity haunts me,” he said.
This haunting continues in “Lunar Park,” with a character, a freshman college student who reminds the novel’s Bret of himself at a young age, first appearing at a Halloween party dressed as Bateman.
“Lunar Park” relies heavily on meticulous description, which sometimes weighs it down with perhaps meaningless details. He painstakingly describes everything: clothes, hair, furniture, drug procedures. So it would seem like Ellis has carefully planned images of his characters and would be picky with the actors chosen to play them.
“I don’t think of actors because I’m not writing a movie. It’s a book. And I only have a vague idea of what an abstraction like Clay (from “Less Than Zero”) or Victor Ward (from “Glamorama”) or Bateman would look like,” he said.
Perhaps the reason Ellis chose to cast himself as the main character was because this novel draws more on his past than any of his previous ones.
“My experiences shaped me into the man I am. Since novels are reflections of that man – it’s inevitable,” he said. “As you get older, yes, you tend to draw more heavily on the past, because you have more of one.”
