Customer Reviews

Lunar Park

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(39)
3 star:		(23)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

"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

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.')

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.

Lunar Park is a supposedly true account of terrifying hauntings that occurred in writer Bret Easton Ellis's life over a series of days immediately following Halloween. Ellis's first chapter alone makes the book a worthwhile read--he recounts his entire life, all of his published novels, all of his excesses, and it makes for great reading. Any Ellis fan should definitely read the first chapter to see a glimpse inside a larger-than-life literary figure.

Starting in Chapter 2, the strange occurrences in his small Northeast college town start taking place. Ellis is, for the first time, trying to live a family life with the mother of his eleven-year-old son, as well as her younger daughter by another man. Ellis is haunted my memories of his father, his father's death, and mysterious emails at the time of night when his father died. Then murders ala Patrick Bateman from American Psycho start occurring in the town (but not in the newspapers), and the Ellis household starts to unravel completely. No one believes Ellis's accounts of the hauntings due to his excessive drinking and drug use. Ellis himself casts doubt on many of the occurrences. His children witness some of the hauntings, but prove to be unreliable witnesses when questioned by other grown-ups after the fact.

One shocking aspect of the book has nothing to do with the hauntings, but with Ellis's conflict with his super-children and the way privileged youngsters are raised these days. Ellis is coming off being a hard-partying self-reliant (but not completely functional) man, and it is hard for him to relate to his children, who are on numerous cocktails of medications to perfect their behavior. They attend a school where violent costumes aren't permitted for Halloween because some children might get scared, but when children tried to find "appropriate" costumes, everyone freaked out en masse, so no Halloween costumes at all were permitted. They go to birthday parties which have "rehearsal" parties to ensure that all the young attendees will get along and respond positively to the enrichment activities. None of the food at these parties contains any dairy, wheat, gluten, or corn syrup (heaven forbid!). At dinner parties, parents obsessively discuss nothing but their children--nursery school as a "portal" into the world, acupuncture for nine-year-olds, the need to cut pasta from the school lunch program, Pilate's for two-year-olds, all of which Ellis describes as a fanatical need for parents to get a return on their investment [p. 133]. At parent-teacher conferences, Ellis overhears a teacher explaining to a concerned couple that the average platypus should look "less deranged" than the one their child drew. The reader can hardly blame Ellis for turning to alcohol to zone-out from this child-obsessed world, so foreign from anything he's lived in before.

Overall, this book is creepy, as Ellis continues to see and experience stranger and stranger things, and no rational adult believes what he is witnessing. It'll keep you up late at night if you try to read it then. It also provides excellent insight into why Ellis wrote American Psycho and how it related to his true-life experiences with his father. I would recommend this book to any Ellis fan as a must-read, because of what he reveals about his personal life, but as someone who has only read one Ellis book (Less Than Zero), it was still completely readable. Ellis doesn't assume the reader knows anything about his novels, and fully explains any references. Pick this one up and prepare to be chilled!

It was hard for me to know how to read this book. I had read all of his previous work, but did not remember much except that none of his books could ever come close to the power of AMERICAN PSYCHO. (And regardless of your feeling about the book, you can't argue it wasn't powerful.)

I was therefore convinced that Ellis had peaked and that everything else he wrote would be points marking his descent. Convinced that LP would be derivative, weak, or worst of all, a shock-filled imitation of AP, as I sometimes felt with his previous novel, GLAMORAMA.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Ellis can write! Instead of finding a stylish copy of previous works, I found that LP is mature in its handling of each moment. More mature than any of Ellis' previous works.

Instead of characters moving listlessly from one profound (yet unexplored) situation to the next, as in previous work, these characters interact with each other and learn and grow and react! I know this sounds very clinical, but that was sometimes how his previous characters felt to me, even the fully realized ones.

These characters do their best to respond to an increasingly surreal environment. An environment which closes in on them even as they are trying to control it. The result of which is the most easily accessible plot in his catalogue, deftly told and even an intelligent mystery in it's own way.

I wanted very badly to like this book. The first chapter was excellent. There was so much promise. I even got excited when I found characters from the book with their own homepages. There are so many ideas that I love in this book that I was sad to see them wasted. It is intense and spooky... but thats about the only thing going for it. In total I found it to be a mess. There was no direction whatsoever. There was no character development (the main character is so frustratingly oblivious you will want to strangle him).
With much of the books lifted from what I attribute to Stephen King novels and The House of Leaves by Danielewski I say read the originals. At least those writers are not completely full of themselves.

I'm a huge fan of Ellis's work and I've enjoyed all of his books. Until this one. An intriguing drama about adjusting to suburban life and giving up the youthful days of partying gets lost in a subplot of cheesy horror. But the scary part is: Ellis was actually trying to be genuinely frightening. And the horror was NOT scary, in fact it was completely ridiculous, and not even funny like it should have been. If the book stuck to the story of fathers, sons and the need for love and family, I could have been open-minded enough to appreciate this new and more mature style of Ellis. But it looks like he's losing his edge, and not to mention, his creative steam. I still give it two stars just because he has such a unique way with words. The words flow across the page beautifully. It's unfortunate, however, that the story itself demands sympathy, and as with all of his other books, I just can't find it in myself to give it to his characters. But unlike the rest of his books where satirical apathy is the key ingredient, this one takes itself a little too seriously for a plot containing demons resembling Cousin It and a homicidal stuffed animal.

I have been a Bret Easton Ellis fan since American Psycho came out in the movie theatre. The movie interested me so much that I had to find out all I could about the author. Since then, I've read all of his novels and enjoyed them. I sometimes feel he gets more credit than he's due and I believe he feels that same way as he hints to this fact in Lunar Park. I have enjoyed all of his books; I "get" them and what he writes about. But it makes me laugh when people quote him as a "genius" or something.

Going along with this, the reviews I always roll my eyes at and laugh at are the ones who profess that a certain book is "about something intrinsic to our society". For instance, looking at the flap of this novel, you get the blurb, "Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another...toward an astonishing resolution--about love and loss, fathers and sons--in what is truely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career." This statement alone could be found in the most glowing reviews, showing to the world that they "get" what Ellis was trying. Its also shamelessly arrogant and pretentious and usually off base.

So it pains me with irony when I have to write this review in a similar way. Lunar Park comprises exactly what the flap says. While arrogant, sure, it really does encompass everything. And more. It is a witty, intelligent and dare I say profound novel (and I hate myself for sounding possibly sounding pretentious). What's striking is that while Bret (the narrator) focuses on his own demons he also focuses on society demons. In descriptions of what he sees, he's quick to point out that the children are on legal drugs (Ritalin etc) and are living life in a disassociated and amnesiac way. The parents are either popping legal drugs or smoking illegal. Everyone is in a haze, not just the main character who is, of course, a drug addict and an alcoholic.

Ellis walks this fine line well, by the way, so that us as readers are never quite sure if everything Bret sees is truly real or if it is due to, like everyone says, his addictions. What surprised me most about this novel was how it started out so light and humorous, his own autobiographical look at his writing career and life, and then slowly, ever so slowly, transformed his life into a waking nightmare, a horror story that was brutally effective. Horror novelists could take a cue from the way Ellis writes the horror, bringing in every day things (Terby, the stains) and slowly tightening the net so that at the end things have become horrific.

At the beginning, what struck me as most comical was how Ellis discussed how everyone wanted his novel "Less Than Zero" to be autobiographical. How everyone assumed that he was the main character. Take that with the dichotomy that he stressed Lunar Park is an autobiography and that everything did happen, and you have this hugely humorous connection. Its almost an "eff you" to people who kept trying to pigeon hole him as an author.

Lunar Park is also Ellis at his most focused in years. I loved American Psycho and Glamorama, but they couldn't exactly be called focused (particularly Glamorama). Here his writing style is much much different from earlier novels (another point he alludes to in the beginning), more streamlined and not as much stream-of-consciousness (for lack of better word).

As Lunar Park continued, I was amazed at how many different stories could be pulled together; there's the "haunted house," the serial killer, the missing boys, the father, the college student, the familial drama, et al, all combined into 308 pages and honed so well that it works. And all of the threads tie together at the end, making this novel rise above some of its contemporaries. It is his most accessible and readable novel in years. At times arrogant, Ellis undercuts himself by showing what a putz he really is. This works well, given the public persona he's given in real life.

Fans of Ellis will most likely enjoy this novel. I also think, however, that fans of horror will also enjoy it a ton. Being a fan of both, I have to say this novel is probably my favorite of his. Its been a long time coming and, for me, it was more than worth the wait. I hope it hasn't been too late.

Ultimately, this novel was about Bret (both the narrator and the author) exorcising his demons of his past. Ironically, by writing a fictional story involving phsyical manifestations, demons, evil toys, a serial killer and a haunted house, Ellis has written a uniquely personal and profound novel. As cliched and surprising as it might seem, given the author, this novel really does become an ode to parents and a plead for them to actually be parents.

I set about reading the works of Bret Easton Ellis after I saw the film "American Psycho". The third Ellis book I read was his latest - "Lunar Park".

The book's main character is named Bret Easton Ellis. He has written numerous novels, all of which have been considerable successes. Yes, kids - the main character of Bret Easton Ellis' "Lunar Park" is, in fact, Bret Easton Ellis. Bret is trying to start over with his new wife, the famous movie star Jayne Dennis, and Jayne's kids, Robby and Sarah. Bret is Robby's father, though they met only recently. Perhaps unsurprisingly, things are not going well for the family. Bret's drug addiction and alcoholism irritates Jayne, who is trying to force Bret into a relationship with detached Robby and young Sarah.

And the paint starts peeling. And the lights start flickering. And there are strange scratch marks on Robby's door. Bret begins to suspect that they may be caused by Sarah's eerie little bird-headed doll, Terby. Is he right, or is it just a druggie's paranoia? What really is happening in that house?

Part of what I love about B.E. Ellis is how different each of his novels are. "Rules of Attraction" was a moody drama, while "Glamorama" was a David Lynchian novel about terrorism. "Lunar Park" is like a more grotesque Stephen King novel. Ellis succeeds in making a novel which scares you and leaves you guessing. I avoided reading "Lunar Park" at night because it was so damn creepy! It's not continuous scares, but there are some definitely frightening moments in here. I found the mystery elements of the book to be fun as well.

Some B.E.E. fans may be disappointed - "Lunar Park" certainly isn't up to par with some of his previous work. But if you're looking for a fun read, you won't be let down.

I had not previously been a Bret Easton Ellis fan. I read "Less Than Zero" when it first came out and thought it was over-rated. None of his subsequent books appealed to me until I read about the new one. I'm glad I overcame my prejudices.

"Lunar Park" is funny, scary and moving in equal measure. It can be enjoyed merely on its surface level, but it is much better appreciated as an allegory about family, failure and forgiveness.

The only reason I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 is that I think there is one significant gaping hole in the plot (unless I missed something). But even that flaw does not diminsh the entertainment value of the book or the profundity of the moving experience one will have from reading it and, even more, thinking about it after its ended.

I am even inspired now to read more of Mr. Ellis's work.