American Psycho: Library Edition

From Strand Bookstore

Patrick Bateman is handsome, well educated, intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights are spent in ways we cannot begin to fathom. He is twenty-six years old and living his own surreal American Dream. 399p.

From the Publisher

Vintage is rushing to put out the controversial book that everyone's talking about--especially after Simon & Schuster decided at the last minute not to publish it. Described by Publishers Weekly as "a grisly, gritty gross-out (about) the cool yuppie lifestyle of Patrick Bateman, 26, whose avocation is torturing and dismembering his female victims and festooning his apartment with their body parts", this new book by the author of Less Than Zero is sure to cause a stir.

From the Publisher

The controversial novel about a handsome serial killer who moves among the young and trendy in 1980s New York.

More about the book

In Bret Easton Ellis's controversial 1989 novel, Patrick Bateman is a sadistic madman who believes that everything (including people) is a commodity designed for his personal gratification. His graphically described acts of torture and murder fail to affect him--and also fail to satisfy him. The epitome of the consumer culture of the 1980s, Bateman is a monstrous icon of an empty and nihilistic world.

First Line

Abandon hope all ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for LES MISERABLES on its side blocking his view....