Lunar Park [Import] [Paperback]

Bret Easton Ellis (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Picador; New Ed edition (June 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330441671
• ISBN-13: 978-0330441674
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (139 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,142,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of five novels and a collection of short stories; his work has been translated into twenty-seven languages. He lives in Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

82 of 95 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mea Maxima Culpa, August 30, 2005

By 

R. W. Rasband (Heber City, UT) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lunar Park (Hardcover)

"Lunar Park" is probably Ellis' best, most readable novel since "Less Than Zero." The influences you can spot are many. The writer using his own public persona as the protagonist surely comes from Philip Roth, most notably his classic "Operation Shylock." Ellis provides some pungent satire on contemporary suburbia, so the title probably hearkens back to John Cheever's Bullet Park. (The revelation after his death of Cheever's ambiguous sexuality no doubt also interested Ellis.) But the main thing Ellis does is offer up an homage to Stephen King (Ellis' fictional wife even calls him "Jack Torrance" at one point, who of course is the protagonist of "The Shining", a book to which this novel owes a whole lot.)

The first chapter of "Lunar Park" may be the most clever thing Ellis has ever written. It's an autobiography that agrees with every bad review, every unflattering press article ever written about the guy. He says he wrote all his books under the influence of drugs, quickly and for the money; he's a monster of sexual promiscuity and excess who incidentally sired a son out of wedlock more than 10 years before. He recounts his tortured relationship with his late father (to whom "Lunar Park" is dedicated). You get the feeling here that Ellis is burning down the edifice of his public career, burning all the bridges to his past. It's hilarious and horriying, and must have taken a lot of courage to write.

The first half of "Lunar Park" is mesmerizing (I managed to finish the book in one night.) He paints an alarming picture of Parenthood In The Suburbs; eveyone, including the very young children, is on some sort of mood-stabilizing medication; the children are scheduled, dieted, and psychoanalyzed to within inches of their lives; the main focus of eveyone's life is money, possessions, and how to get them. It's a society full of living corpses, which is where I suppose Ellis got the idea to turn his book into a horror novel. This proves to be a mistake. The second half of the novel wobbles badly because he simply doesn't have the storytelling chops to make it work. Elite critics can sneer at Stephen King all they like, but he is a master of his craft, and Ellis suffers badly by comparison. Ellis just piles up one horrific incident after another and hopes they cohere into some kind of organic whole, which they really don't. The imagery in the climactic "attack" of the demons seems to have been inspired by the dog scenes in John Carpenter's masterpiece "The Thing."

The most striking thing about this book is how, depending on how literally you take it, Bret Ellis hates himself. The demons attack because they want to force him to confront the "disaster" of his life. The ghost of his father ("Hamlet" is also a big influence) wants to warn Ellis of an impending loss, as well as to force Bret into dealing with his memory. These metaphors are powerful and true and overcome much of the technical messiness of the book. As a man enters middle age the past screams at him for resolution, and Ellis does his best to meet the challenge in this flawed, interesting book

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A surprising progression for Ellis, August 22, 2005

By 

2Deep (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lunar Park (Hardcover)

This really surprised me. Despite what some of the major reviews have implied, this book has very little of the sort of druggy debauchery, and none of the sex, that Ellis' earlier books are known for, despite a plot which forces us to travel back through those same books. What it does have - and have in spades - is a sense of underlying dread that, while present in much of his previous writing, has never been brought to life quite this well. It's horror, but a dreamy horror, more like Lovecraft or Poe than Thomas Harris. Another reviewer here likened `Lunar Park' to Stephen King, and while that reviewer meant it as an insult (I think) it's not a bad comparison. This is a book filled with ghouls and hallucinations, but also real-world horrors: alcoholism, self-hatred, and `antagonism', which, as we learn from a well-drawn exorcist towards the end of the novel, can literally turn a man to ash. There is also the horror of children. In `Lunar Park' we are both afraid FOR them, and afraid OF them - one minute they're having nightmares and need protecting, the next minute they're keeping secrets from us and possibly faking their own abductions. The parents in the book all medicate their kids mercilessly, which only serves to underscore the separation between parents and children, between our lives as we would like to see them, and our lives as they really are.

And then there's the writing. It's wonderful. There's a passage on p.55 - "The newspapers kept stroking my fear. New surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything..." - that offers one of the better descriptions of the post-9/11 mindset I've come across. And the last few pages, in which Ellis makes a shaky truce with the ghost of his father, are heartbreaking (my eyes filled up - I'm not kidding). The only weak scene in the book is the Halloween party that kicks off the whole story - the dialogue between Ellis and Jay McInerney (who makes a cameo appearance) seems so empty that one wonders why Ellis bothered writing it down (then again, maybe he was making a point about those brat-pack days of yore). But this is nitpicking - on the whole Ellis is terrific here.

**On a side note, one book that `Lunar Park' seems to echo, and not just in its title, is John Cheever's classic "Bullet Park." Cheever's book was another story of suburban horror, drenched in alcohol and general despair, with an ending that Ellis could only admire: a guy uses a chainsaw to cut through the doors of a church to save his son from being burned to death by a cold-blooded sadist. Ellis' book does for our generation what Cheever's did for his, and they make great tandem reading (I went back and reread Cheever right after `Lunar Park.')

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Time for retirement?, August 9, 2007

By 

Harley (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lunar Park (Paperback)

Like many, I was so impressed by Bret Easton Ellis's first three novels that I was prepared to read anything with his name attached to it. I stuck by him after the tediousness of The Informers and the absurd and overlong Glamorama because, for the most part, his writing was as good as ever - he was just losing his thematic edge. Unfortunately, Lunar Park represents a further step into banality as not only is its plot ludicrous and its theme largely irrelevant to society at large, but for the first time Ellis's writing appears awkward.

Lunar Park tells the story of a celebrity novelist making a tentative attempt at fatherhood and a life in the suburbs. As the novel progresses it becomes apparent that his house is haunted by the ghost of his father, his daughter's doll is possessed by an evil spirit, a string of murders copycatting American Psycho are being committed, his son may or may not be kidnapping his classmates, the oil leaking from his BMW is the blood of JFK, the nuts in Snickers bars hatch into the things from the Alien movies, he eats an undercooked Whopper blah blah blah who cares. Terrifying, right?

It is ironic that there is so much that can be said about Lunar Park while the book itself says so little. Ellis zig-zags haphazard through the themes of father-and-son, overmedicated society, fiction-into-fact and supernatural occurrence, but spends so little time on each and links them so clumsily that it is impossible for the reader to gain any insight into them, assuming that Ellis himself had any insight to impart to begin with. The supernatural portions that dominate the last third of the book are particularly cringe-worthy as Ellis makes a self-confessed - and poorly advised - homage to Stephen King despite the obvious incompatibilities of their styles. There comes a point when the absurdity of Ellis using his hyper-realistic style to recount the occasion on which a possessed mechanical toy bird grew fangs and gnawed at his trousers becomes apparent. The blurb's conceit that this is an autobiography of sorts is really just a poorly conceived vice to mask Ellis's comprehensive failure to create a suspension of disbelief in his fiction.

It is strange that despite using himself as the lead character and musing on his reactions to his father's death, Ellis still cannot create any sort of emotional resonance within his work. This is a particularly salient failing as one of Lunar Park's primary drives is the assumption of empathy on behalf of the reader, predominantly in relation to Ellis's own character. Ellis begins the book by characterising himself as being only slightly less vacuous than Victor Ward and only slightly more sensitive than Sean Bateman, yet come part two we are immediately meant to empathise with this self-absorbed idiot because he's making some small attempt at self-betterment. This is a stark departure from Ellis's previous novels in which such characters were always presented, rightfully, as objects of derision.

Plot has not traditionally been the focal point of Ellis's novels either, however in Lunar Park it forms the unsteady structure around which the rest of the story is awkwardly plastered. Multiple plots and sub-plots are created and dropped on a whim and ultimately fail to combine into any sort of cohesive whole because the connections that Ellis eventually draws between them are so patently stupid. The lame anagram in the doll's name, the unknowable significance of the house's address, the dumb coincidence in the Harrison Ford movie. It's like, please baby, spare me.

Towards the end of the novel there is a scene in which Ellis (the character) writes the death of Patrick Bateman. The symbolic significance is not hard to grasp. Ellis wrote American Psycho over a decade ago so let's just move on. The problem with this is that American Psycho was an insightful, entertaining, devastatingly funny, razor-sharp social satire. It is one of the best books I have ever read. Lunar Park is self-indulgent drivel. Despite his relentless shallowness Patrick Bateman was a remarkably complex character while the Bret Easton Ellis of this novel can be read clearly straight up-and-down like so many other clichés - daddy daddy why don't you love me - and his problems are simply uninteresting. So if Ellis wrote Lunar Park to cleanse himself of his past, where to from here? Let's hope that it's somewhere much closer to Earth.