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American Psycho | 
| Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $10.17
You Save: $4.78 (32%)
Rating:  1074 reviews
Sales Rank: 2787
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 416
Number Of Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0679735771
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679735779
ASIN: 0679735771
Publication Date: March 1, 1991
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
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Product Description
Now a major motion picture from Lion's Gate Films starring Christian Bale (Metroland), Chloe Sevigny (The Last Days of Disco), Jared Leto (My So Called Life), and Reese Witherspoon (Cruel Intentions), and directed by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol).
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1069 more reviews...
 Horrible and poorly researched August 22, 2008
Jennifer Brown (Austin, Texas)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
If I could rate this book a zero, I would, but the lowest I can rate it is a one. This book is horrible. However, if you are looking for a book that will disgust you, this is the book for you. If you are a reasonably intelligent person, you will hate this book. First of all, it has no point. Secondly, it is so discriptive that it becomes boring really fast. The biggest problem is that it does not make any sense. There is absolutely no psychological disorder that would cause someone to go to such extremes so fast (aside from brain damage but the book does not tell of any reason for this to have occured. A person would not just start acting this way, psychologically, this does not happen.) The person that wrote this obviously did not do any research into psychopaths or psychotic behaviour. It is clear that the purpose of the book was not to be accurate, but simply to push the limits. It is so over the top that it comes off very disorganized and, to put it plainly, poorly written. Some might argue that this is what the writer wanted to portray, but this is hard to beleive. As I said before, the person that wrote this has no idea how true psycopaths act. Therefore, writting it this way to show how psychotic Patrick Bateman is only proves just how bad the book is, because the psychosis is so incorrectly portrayed. If he was trying to be clever, he failed.
One last thing. One thing I liked about the book if the fact that he inserts quotes from real serial killers. However, when Bateman quotes "When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, two things go through my head. Part of me thinks that I would like to take her out, date her. The other part of me wonders what her head would look like on a stick." I am paraphrasing of course. Good quote, but unfortunately, Bateman attributes it to Ed Gein, but it was actually said be Edmond Kemper.
 This Is NOT An Exit August 14, 2008
Mrs. Bateman
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
'American Psycho' is a satire of the 1980's (among other subjects) centered around narrator Patrick Bateman who is the yuppie-to-end-all-yuppies. Though the humor is as dark as possible, it's true to Ellis and true to the story. I cannot find any failure whatsoever with this book. For readers who complain parts are "boring" or "gross": I would tell you that this is not accidental. Bret Easton Ellis is such a brilliant writer, he is able to manipulate the reader with very little effort. It is a gift with which very few authors are blessed. If you're reading Ellis and you feel bored: he has duped you. If you're reading Ellis and you find a scene so gruesome you're forced to close your book: he's duped you. Let me assure you Bateman's pages-long ridiculously verbose meditations about things such as a Whitney Houston album were never intended to excite anyone. 'American Psycho' is as beautifully written as it hilarious and disturbing.
'American Psycho' is, by far, my favorite novel of all time. It's also an effective litmus book in that if someone tells me they don't like it/ didn't get it, we're probably not compatible.
A Nightmarish Comedy of Manners July 20, 2008
ninjasuperstar (Iowa)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
American Psycho is Bret Easton Ellis' grotesque comedy about the decadent underbelly of Wall Street culture in the 1980s, as experienced firsthand through protagonist Patrick Bateman. The book is the only example I have read of controlled and literate obscenity. Few books demand their readers to both laugh and cringe in disgust. Ellis accomplishes this by combining a Zeitgeist protagonist (as Fyodor Dostoevsky does in Notes from Underground), a comedy of manners (consider a very twisted Jane Austen), and the 1980s American height of materialism and capitalism.
The novel is not as overwhelming as all of that sounds, because Ellis is a fantastic teacher. He eases you into the themes of the overall satire he is attempting to compose, so that when the first shock comes, at least you have been partially primed for the graphic imagery it conjures.
One of the novel's constant jokes concerns excruciating details about the brand names of the material possessions in Bateman's vicinity and, sometimes, his judgments of the people who own those possessions. Ellis does a great job helping the reader plow through the barrage of high-end designer labels and features of new-fangled gadgets by writing the novel in an exuberant and often manic first person, present tense narrative. Almost all fiction is written in past tense, and it's refreshing for Ellis to try something few attempt, and to do it well.
I found that reading the book out loud makes the humor rise from the page, especially during the scenes when Bateman endlessly catalogues the contents of his purchases from an upscale store or the respective entrees of his friends while they dine at a trendy restaurant. I did not read the gruesome scenes of rape, torture, and murder out loud, however. I admit that I didn't want to get too close to those words.
I initially thought that the book was too long. Almost everything that is going to happen occurs within the first 250 pages of the book, and the rest of the novel (with the exception of the final 30 pages) is comprised largely of variations on the themes. In short, I started to get slightly bored, and I thought maybe the book wasn't as well written as I had thought. Then I realized that Bateman, too, was getting bored and it hit me: I've become as desensitized as the protagonist. It's then that I understood clearly one of the novel's powerful understatements: Any of us has the potential to be Patrick Bateman. Certainly, such a notion isn't likely to be rendered real, but it does mean that Bateman is operating within the scope of humanity; granted, he's at the division between human and demon. It also means that the length of the text is perfect.
In the end, Ellis wants his readers to understand that life reduced to overpriced suits and food, designer drugs and bottled water, un-spendable amounts of wealth, ultra metrosexuality and obsessive health consciousness, and mind-numbing and soul-crushing careers are in fact the polite and fashionably correct equivalents of rape, torture, and murder. The reader is left to decide what to do about it.
Its all about the clothes. June 22, 2008
Ashley Gillard
1 out of 10 found this review helpful
I'm guessing that this book was suppose to be about Bateman living in a society where everyone is fake. But all I got out of it was whole chapters on Whintey Huston and several pages out of fashion magazines. Along with the graphic scences and odd writing style, this book is very hard to get into.
Worth reading even if you don't like the genre June 19, 2008
Clementine Dare (Mechanicsburg, PA United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Truthfully this is a brutal book about a psychopath. It is also a compulsively readable book. I find violent movies and violent books repulsive as a rule, but sometimes I come across one and give in and read it. And then put it down as unbearable because the story or the character is not good enough to outweigh my revulsion at the topic. I guess I have a nervous stomach or a vivid imagination. I know the genre has it's fans and I don't want to denigrate that.
American Psycho was an exception for me. I put it back on my wish list to remind myself that this is a book I plan to re-read. I also want to read other books by Brett Easton Ellis.
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