I finally finished the book American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. It was written in 1991 and is about Patrick Bateman who is a wealthy 27 year old who murders people for fun. He is a fashion expert and you get a good idea of his daily routine by the detailed explanations provided by the author. The specifics of the attire described throughout the entire book makes me realize how far away I am from being fashionable. The details to the murder scenes are a bit over the top and even grossed me out to the point of just wanting to skip over those sections but I obviously didn’t. I liked the analysis of Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News, and Whitney Houston and am actually listening to some Huey while I’m writing this. The whole name mixing up part was pretty funny too because Ellis was showing how materialistic these types of people are and don’t really care about other people. There is a lot of ambiguity in the ending and I’m not really sure anything ever happened throughout the entire book. I write that as a two part question because there is some debate whether Bateman really murdered people and also because there was no real goal to the book. Nothing really ever happened, just a look into a 2-3 year time period of Bateman’s life.

I thought that this was a pretty interesting read but wouldn’t list it as one of my favorite books. The whole rat and tube thing was just so disgusting that I’m not going to describe and can’t even comprehend how people even think of these types of things. Aside from the disturbing descriptions of some scenes I was pretty entertained by the life of Patrick Batemen and his thoughts on how he goes through life day by day. Did it change my viewpoints on life at all? I think it’s fair to say that I don’t have any of these thoughts that a serial killer might have.

Scene from the movie.