LUNAR PARK - Bret Easton Ellis - Fiction

This novel is amazing.

Without knowing a thing about Ellis's prior work, LUNAR PARK succeeds as a remarkably well-thought-out thriller, segueing seamlessly from Ellis's real, sensational past to a fictionalized present, including a marriage and a move to the suburbs, after which his past literally returns to haunt him. The plot draws handily from the genre--a possessed stuffed animal, a shape-shifting house, a group of young boys going missing one by one--and puts the character of Bret right in the middle of it, an already notedly unreliable narrator in personal rehab, reacting with first disbelief, then alcohol, then absolutely numbing terror, to his personal creator and fictional creations seemingly coming to life. Sons become fathers here, boys run away and return, and family is touchingly redeemed, outside of its upper-class nuclear formation. Without attempting to draw a John Irving comparison, a primary message of this novel is the importance of a father's role.

Though as adept as Stephen King (and with the same fascination with old-model cars), Ellis depends less on outside malevolence, eventually rejecting as laughable the idea that his house might be built on a burial ground, and instead is only seriously threatened by what seems to be the work of his own hand. And while these apparitions and attacks are frightening, equally frightening is the fictional Bret's behavior toward his wife, his friends, and his addiction. In this aspect, Ellis returns to a vein that runs through his work from LESS THAN ZERO through THE INFORMERS, AMERICAN PSYCHO, and GLAMORAMA, in presenting crimes equally horrific as daily behavior. The college-age swingers and drug abusers in LESS THAN ZERO are as frightening waking up from a horrendous binge as they are kidnapping a child; Patrick Bateman's sadistic emptiness is exposed just as much in his discussions with his secretary and his long-winded explanations of his outdated and indiscriminating music taste as in his murders. In exposing the upper-class guignol that passes for suburban family life among the rich and paranoid, Ellis illustrates a horror that matches that of his private haunting.

For those readers familiar with Ellis, the novel is even more enticing, as it offers the details we think we know about Ellis (some of the same things we think we know about Chuck Palahniuk, who dives into non-fiction on occasion, to supplement the record). His public castigation for AMERICAN PSYCHO by liberal factions natonwide is the jumping-off point from the intro's factual summation of Ellis's previous crimes into its delineation of his new, fictional transgressions. In a way, this novel is an answering redeption of Ellis, who doesn't hurt a thing but in self-defense: the monster we have come to believe is behind Patrick Bateman turns out to be merely a repentant alcoholic with an uncovered familial streak. Unmasked, Ellis separates himself from The Writer--a character who resides mainly in his head--and a younger version of himself, or possibly his father, who ends up only trying to warn him of a real imposter. As everything in this work is finely wrought and twice-measured, the first sentence is "You do a very good impression of yourself." This applies both to the fictionalized Ellis in LUNAR PARK and the public figure Bret Easton Ellis, gossip column alumnus and well-known bad boy, yet somehow, the novel implies, not the real man at all.