The worst thing that probably ever happened to author Bret Easton Ellis is the success of Less Than Zero, his 1985 debut novel. Ellis was 21 years old when the book became a sensation, hitting the bestseller list and becoming a film starring Robert Downey Jr. and Andrew McCarthy.
If most writers find fame at all, it comes late in their careers. The year 1985, when Less Than Zero was published, also saw the release of Larry McMurtry’s Western epic Lonesome Dove. McMurtry had written six novels leaving up to that. Like musicians, novelists need to find their footing with early work that maybe doesn’t get a huge amount of attention. It allows them to find their voice and develop some depth.
Because Ellis went supernova his first time out, it gave him permission to spend the next 40 years covering the same territory — i.e., the ennui of rich, bored young people, primarily in Los Angeles, whose lives were numb from cocaine, too much sun, and no sense of direction. Numbness is a constant theme. To keep things interesting among the sex, drugs, and pop culture references, Ellis tosses in some graphic violence.
This is the case with The Shards. The new novel explores what happens to Bret Ellis — Ellis has made himself a fictional character in his own work — when a serial killer nicknamed “the Trawler” prowls Los Angeles in the early 1980s. At the same time, a mysterious new boy named Robert Mallory arrives at Buckley, Bret’s exclusive private school. As Bret begins to see connections between the Trawler and Robert, he is overwhelmed by paranoia and fear. Yet Bret is an unreliable narrator — we never know what is real or imagined. Robert himself tells Bret that “you hear things that aren’t really there.”
Bret has a girlfriend, Debbie, but he is gay and sinks his pain with drugs and alcohol. His parents are absent, on vacation, leaving him in a gorgeous house with a swimming pool in Los Angeles. (For some 1980s teens this situation would have been like heaven on earth. (Not for Ellis).
The drugs, boredom, pop songs, depression, and occasional explosions of violence go on for 600 pages, and while Ellis keeps things moving and The Shards is entertaining, one can’t help but feel that Ellis could have set his sights on more contemporary stuff and done so without all the meta self-awareness and cool wayfarer and synth-pop distance.
After all, Ellis is in a perfect position to do a satire of modern liberalism. Just as American Psycho was a satire of what Ellis perceived as the materialism, vanity, and capitalistic brutality of 1980s yuppie culture, a new work by Ellis could have dismantled the lecturing hysteria and self-importance of the modern Left.
Furthermore, Ellis has always used horror tropes in his work, and the Left’s defense of nightmares, like withholding care from a baby left alive after a botched abortion, is right out of Stephen King, who was a major influence on Ellis.
In what at the time became a notorious interview, Ellis was asked by the New Yorker in 2019 why he wasn’t losing his mind over Donald Trump. The writer just couldn’t understand Ellis’s nonchalance. “When did people start identifying so relentlessly with victims, and when did the victim’s worldview become the lens through which we began to look at everything?” Ellis responded.
The New Yorker went on to call White, Ellis’s 2019 nonfiction work, “a sustained howl of displeasure aimed at liberal hand-wringers, people obsessively concerned with racism, and everyone who is not over Donald Trump’s election. His targets range from the media to Michelle Obama to millennials (including his boyfriend). Ellis also defends less popular people, from Roseanne Barr to Kanye West, whom he perceives as having been given a raw deal by the mob.”
Badgered over and over by the New Yorker to express more outrage over Trump, Ellis advised calm: “I just think that there is a man that got elected president. He is in the White House. He has vast support from his base. He was elected fairly and legally. And I think what happened is that the Left is so hurt by this that they have overreacted to the presidency. Now, look, I live with a Democratic, socialist-bordering-on-communist millennial. I hear it every day.”
The response to Ellis’s dose of reality was volcanic, feral. Here was the foundation for what could have been a fantastic Ellis novel — a level-headed Generation Xer from the 1980s getting mauled by a pack of woke leftist wolves. It could be like The Wolfen, the horror movie that was released in 1981, the same year The Shards is set. There could be a great scene of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) transforming under a full moon.
With her blood-red lipstick and rouge choppers, the speaker wouldn’t even need much makeup.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of the book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
