Lunar Park (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: parent teacher night, Patrick Bateman, Elsinore Lane, Aimee Light (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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Book Description:
Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs.

Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety--only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father's, his stepdaughter's doll violently "malfunctions," and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events--a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son’s age--Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania.

Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution--about love and loss, fathers and sons--in what is surely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career.

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A Tale of Two Brets: An Amazon.com Interview with Bret Easton Ellis
In his novel Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis takes first-person narrative to an extreme, inserting himself (and a host of real characters from the publishing world) into the haunting story of a drugged-out famous writer living in the suburbs trying to reconnect with his wife and son and reconcile his damaged past. Ellis is at the top of his game in Lunar Park, his first novel since 1999's Glamorama, delivering a disturbing and delirious novel about celebrity, writers, and fathers and sons (not to mention a cameo from notorious Ellis creation, Patrick Bateman). Amazon.com senior editor Brad Thomas Parsons spoke with Ellis in a Seattle to Los Angeles phone call to talk about the fact and fiction behind Lunar Park, New York versus LA, '80s music, and the whole "American Psycho thing."

Read the Amazon.com interview with Bret Easton Ellis

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Less Than Zero (1985)
Published when Ellis was a junior at Bennington, Less Than Zero is the mesmerizing first-person chronicle of Clay, our laconic, zoned-out guide to a subculture of over-privileged nihilism in early '80s Los Angeles. He travels back home from Camden College (a thinly veiled Bennington) for Christmas break and re-enters his circle of jaded friends--including his ex-girlfriend Blair, and his best friend Julian, who's now hustling to support his drug habit--and a parade of Porches, late-night parties, cocaine, and casual destruction.

Ellis on Ellis: "I don't think it's a perfect book by any means, but it's valid. I get where it comes from. I get what it is. There's a lot of it that I wish was slightly more elegantly written. Overall, I was pretty shocked. It was pretty good writing for someone who was 19."

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The Rules of Attraction (1987)
A line-up of Camden College students share the narrating duties in The Rules of Attraction, Ellis' sex-fueled, drug-baked second novel. There's Lauren (who's in the midst of losing her virginity as the book opens), who longs for her boyfriend Victor, currently traveling through Europe; Lauren's ex, Paul, a bisexual party boy who hooks up with hard-drinking closet-case Sean (surname Bateman--that's right, younger brother of Patrick), who also has the hots for Lauren. Less than Zero's Clay makes a cameo appearance as well as a passing glimpse of Ellis' Bennington classmate Donna Tartt's murderous Classics majors from The Secret History.

Ellis on Ellis: "It might be my favorite book of mine. I was writing that book while I was at college. Sort of like the best of times, the worst of times. There was a lot of elation, there was a lot of despair. It was just a really fun book to write. I loved mimicking all the different voices. The stream of conscious does get a little out of hand. I kind of like that about the book. It's kind of all over the place. It's casual. It's scruffy. That's the one book of mine that I have a very, very soft spot for."

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American Psycho (1991)
Shopaholic sociopath Patrick Bateman's killer grip drags readers into a bloody, brand-name, urban nightmare as the 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie executes his grooming habits and eviscerates strangers with equal élan. Simon & Schuster dropped the too-hot-to-handle American Psycho which was then published as a paperback original by Vintage Books. Ellis received death threats while the book was boycotted, sliced up by reviewers, and went on to become a bestseller. Mary Harron's 2000 film version starred then little-known British actor Christian Bale, who would later suit up as the Dark Knight in 2005's Batman Begins.

Ellis on Ellis: "It was good. It was fun. It was not nearly as pretentious as I remember I wanted it to be when I was writing it. I found it really fast-moving. I found it really funny. And I liked it a lot. The violence was... it made my toes curl. I really freaked out. I couldn't believe how violent it was. It was truly upsetting. I had to steel myself to re-read those passages."

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The Informers (1994)
Ellis returns to early '80s Los Angeles ennui with The Informers, a loosely connected collection of stories of the bored, rich, and morally depraved, written around the same time as Less than Zero. Sex, drugs, and gratuitous violence take center stage, with characters including an aging, predatory anchorwoman, a debauched rock star tearing through Japan, and a pick-up artist vampire. While some of the vignettes echo better Ellis works, ultimately the stories don't add to much as a whole. Book critics are less than receptive to Ellis' post-American Psycho offering.

Ellis on Ellis: "Those were written while I was at Bennington. I wrote a lot of short stories between 1981 or 1982 or so... The Informers more or less kind of represented probably the best of those stories. I wrote a lot of really bad ones, but those are the ones that worked the best together."

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Glamorama (1999)
Actor-model Victor Ward (who first made an appearance in the Ellis oeuvre in The Rules of Attraction) is the narrator of Glamorama, Ellis longest novel yet. Ellis offers bold-faced names and celebrity skewering in the first half of the book as Victor tries to open a Manhattan club while cheating on his supermodel girlfriend and double-crossing his partner, but the second half takes a violent, paranoid turn as Victor is sent to England and unwittingly lured into a sadistic ring of international terrorists (posing as supermodels) leaving a bloody trail across the globe.

Ellis on Ellis: "[T]he book wasn't necessarily about terrorism to me. It was about a whole bunch of other stuff. It's definitely the book that I can tell--I don't know if other people can tell but I can tell as a writer--is probably the most divisive that I've written. It has an equal number of detractors as it does fans. It doesn't really hold true with the other books. It was the one that took the longest to write, and the one that seemed the most important at the time. It's an unwieldy book... I like it."

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Ellis on DVD

Less Than Zero

American Psycho

The Rules of Attraction

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Will the Real Bret Easton Ellis Please Stand Up?
Visit the author's Web site at www.2brets.com.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Having ridden to fame as the laureate of Reagan-era excesses, Ellis serves up a self-eviscerating apologia for all the awful things (wanton drug use, reckless promiscuity, serial murder) he worked so hard to glamorize. Narrated faux memoir style by a character named Bret Easton Ellis, author of bestsellers, L.A. native, friend to Jay McInerney, the book seeks to make obvious its autobiographical elements without actually remaining true to the facts. In the novel, Ellis marries B-list actress Jayne Dennis (with whom he'd fathered a child years earlier), moves to the New York City suburbs and begins working on his latest neo-porn shocker, Teenage Pussy, when things start to go awry. His house becomes possessed by strange, threatening spirits intent on attacking his family and transforming their home into the pink stucco green shag disaster of Ellis's childhood; a well-read stalker begins acting out, victim by victim, the plot of American Psycho; and the town becomes enthralled by a string of child abductions (oddly, only the boys are disappearing) that may or may not be the work of Ellis's son. This is a peculiar novel, gothic in tone and supernatural in conceit, whose energy is built from its almost tabloidlike connection to real life. As a spirit haunting Ellis's house tells him, "I want you to reflect on your life. I want you to be aware of all the terrible things you have done. I want you to face the disaster that is Bret Easton Ellis." Ultimately, though, the book reads less like a roman à clef than as a bizarre type of celebrity penance. The closest contemporary comparison is, perhaps, the work of Philip Roth, who went for such thinly veiled self-criticism earlier in his career, but Roth's writing succeeded on its own merits, whereas Lunar Park begs a knowledge of Ellis's celebrity and the casual misanthropy his books espoused. Yet for those familiar with Ellis's reputation, the book is mesmerizing, easily his best since Less than Zero. Maybe for the first time, Ellis acknowledges that fiction has a truth all its own and consequences all too real. It is his demons who destroy his home, break up his family and scuttle his best chance at happiness and sobriety. As a novel by anyone else, Lunar Park would be hokum, but in context, it is a fascinating look at a once controversial celebrity as a middle-aged man.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details Paperback: 416 pages Publisher: Vintage (August 29, 2006) Language: English ISBN-10: 0375727272 ISBN-13: 978-0375727276 Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (123 customer reviews) Amazon.com Sales Rank: #39,468 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books) Popular in this category: (What's this?) #5 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( E ) > Ellis, Bret Easton

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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
parent teacher night

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Patrick Bateman, Elsinore Lane, Aimee Light, Range Rover, Midland County, American Psycho, Bank of America, Harrison Ford, Sherman Oaks, Donald Kimball, Paul Owen, Four Seasons, Bernard Erlanger, Less Than Zero, New York, Kentucky Pete, Teenage Pussy, Bret Easton Ellis, Orsic Motel, Lunar Park, Ventura Boulevard, San Fernando Valley, The Informers, Nadine Allen, Mark Huntington

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Citations (learn more)

3 books cite this book:

• How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide by John Sutherland on 5 pages
• Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time by Samuel Francis (ed.) in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
• Altered States: America Since the Sixties (Reaktion Books - Contemporary Worlds) by Jeremy Black on page 233

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	58% buy the item featured on this page: Lunar Park 3.3 out of 5 stars (123) $10.20
	14% buy American Psycho 3.6 out of 5 stars (1,092) $10.20
	13% buy Less Than Zero 3.6 out of 5 stars (234) $9.13
	8% buy Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries) 3.3 out of 5 stars (311) $10.85

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Customer Reviews

123 Reviews 5 star:  (30) 4 star:  (36) 3 star:  (19) 2 star:  (21) 1 star:  (17)           Average Customer Review 3.3 out of 5 stars (123 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews 73 of 83 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (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 12 of 12 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.') 7 of 7 people found the following review helpful: 4.0 out of 5 stars Creepy, shocking view inside the mind of a man who may or may not be sane, November 12, 2005 By  Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    This review is from: Lunar Park (Hardcover) 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!		Ad feedback   Most Recent Customer Reviews 5.0 out of 5 stars Lunar Park - Ellis Doesn't Disappoint Lunar Park embodies the maturity of Ellis as an author. For fans of all of his earlier works, this was definitely worth the wait. Read more Published 2 months ago by Richard J. Wilmoth 4.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not as good as it could be Let me start by warning you Bret Easton Ellis is my favorite author, hands down. I received this book as a gift a couple of years ago and while it wasn't exactly what I had hoped... Read more Published 8 months ago by DK 4.0 out of 5 stars Good deal! Used library book, but still in good condition. Book came quickly and was cheap. Overall good deal! Published 13 months ago by Brandon M. Roush 5.0 out of 5 stars Ellis delivers again I found this to be one of the most bizarre, creative, and entertaining books I've ever read. It's so hard to describe, though, that I've had to leave and come back to this review... Read more Published 14 months ago by K. A. Kegley 4.0 out of 5 stars Sinister When you read Ellis, you expect a twisted darkness that he has become known for. But the thing that fascinated me most with Lunar Park was his ability to combine fact and fiction... Read more Published 15 months ago by Julie Merilatt 1.0 out of 5 stars It just went on and on about nothing Whilst in San Francisco in 2005 was in a bookstore where Ellis read the first few pages of this book at a book signing. Read more Published 19 months ago by kirb carlisle 4.0 out of 5 stars Angst and Despair Reign Reviewed by Charles Shea LeMone www.allwordman.com In his fifth novel, Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis has found the perfect anti-hero: himself. Read more Published 20 months ago by Charles Lemone 4.0 out of 5 stars Worth It For a book that starts out with a pseudo autobiography, for a book that features a self-indulgent main character, for a book that draws its themes from a series of obvious... Read more Published 22 months ago by Mark Stevens 1.0 out of 5 stars Just awful Ellis turns into a cheap wannabe-Steven-King. A bad bad spine chiller (we are talking monster birds attacking the narrator in a haunted house), that has no literary depth... Read more Published 23 months ago by M. Steffens 5.0 out of 5 stars I hated this book So why the 5? The book is perfectly constructed, the characters are real, the choice of making the author the main character and his books important to the plot brilliant; the... Read more Published on August 19, 2007 by Ann Ahnemann Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (August 29, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375727272
• ISBN-13: 978-0375727276
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (123 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #39,468 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 83 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (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

12 of 12 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.')

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Creepy, shocking view inside the mind of a man who may or may not be sane, November 12, 2005

By	Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Lunar Park (Hardcover)

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!