Bret Easton Ellis returns with ‘The Shards’ – dark autofiction

After an interlude of 12 years, Bret Easton Ellis is back with “The Shards,” a 736-page tome set in a posh prep school.

Hedonistic, dark and wild, this tragic-comic tale set in 1980s Los Angeles thrusts us into a clique of wealthy, troubled youngsters.

The work comes on the heels of “Imperial Bedrooms” published in 2010. In his latest novel, the author, or part of him, is both the narrator and main character, leading many to wonder where fact ends and fiction begins, given the novel’s main character is a teenager named Bret.

No matter, says the author. He is not worried about conveying the truth, he has told various media outlets in interviews.

The main character and his friends all attend Buckley, an expensive private school, and almost all of them are highly privileged. They spend their time getting high on marijuana and cocaine, their lives unfolding to a soundtrack of Blondie, The Babys and Duran Duran.

While Ellis the author is gay, his protagonist Bret is bisexual and cheats on his girlfriend Debbie, fantasizing about men and having sexual encounters with them.

When he was at school, Ellis recalls having a girlfriend who he called “one of the most popular girls in our senior class.” But, he says, “I was gay, and only pretending to be a boyfriend,” he told Britain’s Unherd website.

His latest work features several passages about Bret’s sexual appetites and his pleasure in experimentation.

Alongside Bret and Debbie, we also read about a popular quarterback Thom and Susan who is beautiful and numb, a perhaps more typical high-school couple within the circle of friends.

The work is initially light-hearted, as easy-going as the California summer Bret describes.

But although his senior year was meant to be a dream, in the end it is anything but, as events take an ever darker turn.

This is 1981, as the enigmatic Robert Mallory joins their group. Girls are all drawn to him but he is surrounded by mystery, with people wondering why he has come to the school just for his senior year.

Right from their first encounter, Bret suspects he is a liar and decides to get to the bottom of what drives this newcomer.

Unlike other campus novels with their relationship tiffs and squabbles, Ellis gives the reader a disturbing narrative, showing us the flipside of the seemingly perfect lives of these wealthy young people.

They are battling with a Los Angeles that is both dazzling and threatening, peopled by strange and corrupt adults with all their vanities and intrusions.

Take the father of one of the teens, a well-connected, self-righteous Hollywood producer who hides his sexual appetites for underage students.

Then there’s the “Trawler,” a serial killer who terrorises the city.

Ellis is a skilful storyteller, keeping the tension high with one cliffhanger after the next.

But that is easy, as the narrator is the ageing Bret, an omniscient observer who knows how the story ends.

Even seemingly inconsequential situations come to life with gripping dialogue and unexpected twists, with a rich tapestry of detail throughout the work.

But this too is a weakness as some of it is virtually unreadable, from the graphic descriptions of crime scenes to the protagonist’s explicit fantasies. No, this book is not for the squeamish.

And yet we already know that this author is not worried about the sensitivities of his audience, having faced a barrage of criticism for some of the graphic scenes in his earlier work, “American Psycho.”

He does not set out to offend people, he has said, telling Unherd that he is not thinking about the reader when creating a book. “I don’t really write for an audience.”

Like every book he has written, “it starts with a feeling,” he says.

He is trying to work something out. “I often write a novel because I’m stuck at a certain point in my life,” he told Variety. “I’m confused, I’m scared, I’m having anxiety and I can’t quite figure out how to move forward. I’m kind of trapped someplace, and the writing flows from that.”

That has resulted in a turbo ride of a read that is suffused with dread. A horror-packed journey through glitzy, ’80s LA, it is certainly not for the faint hearted.