The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

A sensational new novel from the bestselling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city. His first novel in 13 years, The Shards is Bret Easton Ellis at his inimitable best.

LA, 1981. Buckley College in heat. 17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends, even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equalled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence.

Can he trust his friends – or his own mind – to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, Bret spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at 17 – sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.

REVIEWS

“Ellis is a true literary craftsman, and the novel’s imagery is lush and gorgeous . . . there is an exciting new vulnerability in Ellis’s latest book, inviting the reader more profoundly into the emotional realm of the protagonist than he has with his previous characters.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“It’s been a dozen years since Bret Easton Ellis published a novel. And his latest, The Shards . . . is worth the wait. Hermetic, paranoid, sleek, dark—and with brief explosions of the sex and violence that have characterized Ellis’ oeuvre—The Shards is a stark reminder that the American Psycho author is a genre unto himself.” —NPR

“Cleverly done . . . eerie . . . The Shards establishes a tricky two-step of sincerity and unreliability.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“The teen narrator is perversely endearing, through the sheer force of his striving and unreliability . . . Here, for sure, is a horror story of the 80s.” —Air Mail

"A thrilling page turner from Ellis, who revisits the world that made him a literary star with a stylish scary new story that doesn't disappoint.” –Town & Country

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Swift Press
ISBN: 978-0593469163
Pages: 594