American Psycho

On a typical morning in 1980s Manhattan, Patrick Bateman applies a pore-minimizing mask, selects a Valentino suit, and heads to his desk at Pierce & Pierce, where he spends his days orchestrating mergers he barely understands. By night, he tortures and murders with methodical brutality. Bret Easton Ellis's third novel, published in 1991, is narrated by this 26-year-old investment banker, whose flat, affectless voice catalogues designer labels, restaurant reservations, and pop music analysis with the same deadpan precision he uses to describe dismemberment.

The novel arrives as a savage satire of yuppie culture. Bateman and his colleagues, Timothy Price, David Van Patten, Craig McDermott, are interchangeable men who mistake each other's identities and converse only about business cards, reservation status at Dorsia, and the relative merits of Huey Lewis versus Whitney Houston. Ellis layers these vapid exchanges with increasingly graphic violence: Bateman attacks homeless men, prostitutes, colleagues, and acquaintances. The horror lies not just in the acts but in the utter absence of emotional response. Bateman narrates a murder and then, in the same paragraph, obsesses over the pattern on a new silk tie.

The book's most famous feature is its ending. Bateman confesses everything to his lawyer, Harold Carnes, who mistakes him for someone else and laughs it off as a bad joke. When Bateman visits an apartment where he left corpses, the space is clean and a real estate agent tells him it has never been used. Ellis never resolves whether the murders happened or were fantasy. The ambiguity is the point: in a world where everyone looks the same and nothing has meaning, even atrocity becomes indistinguishable from the general noise.[edit]