Bret Easton Ellis never disappoints. The Shards is no exception.

When a 600+ page book consumes your thoughts and drives you to turn the pages whenever you have a spare moment, you know you’ve encountered something special. This deep dive back into the 80s was like taking a vacation back in time. The only thing that could elevate the experience is a cultivated playlist on Spotify of the songs that transport us in the book.

A million thanks for a stunning read.

I absolutely loved American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, but I couldn't get into this latest novel at all. It was incredibly repetitive.

"A novel of sensational literary and psychological suspense from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged high school friends in a vibrantly fictionalized 1980s Los Angeles as a serial killer strikes across the city.

Bret Easton Ellis's masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

Seventeen-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 equaled 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 - and Bret in particular - with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. 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, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A., The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at seventeen - sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best."

A typical Bret Easton Ellis book, in that is loved and panned in equal measures.

Bret and his friends live the exact lives we would expect from a group of close friends at a prestigious prep school in the 80s- lots of sex, drugs, and crazy antics. But with a serial killer on the loose, who begins sending messages to Bret and his friends, things change fast. Could it be one of Bret's friends? Or the new guy who has latched onto their group? Or can Bret not trust his own mind and instincts?

This book reminded me a lot of his previous works. Ellis certainly has an unmistakable style! The description sounded amazing, but the actual book centered more on sex than the murder mystery. While I do not mind sex in books, this felt over the top and got pretty redundant and unnecessary. Overall I liked this, but did not love it. I think this would be a big hit for any dieheard BEE fans though. New fans may want to start with something a little less daunting....did I mention it is over 600 pages?!

Thank you Netgalley for an arc of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

I gave this the ole college try but couldn't do it.

This is 600pg of dense semi autobiographical fiction loosely based on Ellis' life.

I tried several times to get through this book but could only make it a fraction of the way through. I think if it was cut in half it'd be more palatable.

The Shards is 600 pages of Gen-X angst, teenage infidelity, aimless driving, Ultravox quoting, serial killer hysteria, literary repetition, run-on sentences, and gay sex a-go-go. Basically, another generation-defining read by Bret Easton Ellis. And it is good.

Following the death of John Hughes in 2009, Ellis remains as one of the leading voices for Gen Xers. His writings are full of solitary teens thinking and behaving in adult manners belaying their physicality. They are rich. They are hip. They listen to the best music ever made. And are oh-so dirty. All representing the ultimate Gen X dream of privileged independence.

The Shards is written in first person memoir-style. A young Bret Ellis is popular-by-association in the preppy Buckley High of 1981 where his lustful thoughts of boys (and men, and occasionally his girlfriend) intersect with the gnarly killings of the Trawler, a serial killer who is preying on the young and hip of Beverly Hills. Bret becomes obsessed with both. And listens to a lot of Ultravox all the while. No doubt Ellis did listen to Ultravox in the Eighties (probably still does - and so should you!), the Bret Ellis of The Shards is the most unreliable of narrators. The Bret of the story, like the author himself, is a writer and elaboration is his craft.

Ellis, like his characters within, tends to ramble. Certain thoughts, phrases, and themes are restated enough to become wearisome. Yet his deep teenage drama, which reads much more relevant than nostalgic, remains compelling as Ellis strengthens the lives of his friends: the hunky Thom, the gorgeous Susan, the outgoing Debbie, and mysterious Robert.

While elements of these neurotic, bohemian teens might almost seem like a retconned prequel for Less Than Zero, the unfocused roving and contemplations of the Trawler’s existence places The Shards more as a spiritual cousin to American Psycho. Similar to how the reader does not accompany Patrick Bateman out until nearly at the novel’s halfway point, so too do the Trawler’s antics nearly become forgotten during large chunks of life at Buckley… until they take the forefront. Ellis then has Bret’s life as a gay teen seeking nothing more than to quietly finish out his senior year converging with the Trawler mystery in a surprisingly personal way.

With lots of blood. Of course. And keen attention to high-end sports cars.

The Shards can come across as grating wish fulfillment. The teens range from totally obnoxious to absolutely ridiculous, especially with the amount of free drugs and alcohol readily available, not to mention absurd absentee parenting. But Ellis also presents truths - and ones that span the generations - such as ignorance, where the teens are little more than incoherent Charlie Brown-adults making mhaw-wah-wah noises to the grown-ups in the room; the importance to find one’s way, regardless if you are a snotty seventeen-year-old with a penchant for Stanley Kubrik movies; and the dangers that society always presents, even in safe, sunny Beverly Hills.

In short, Bret Easton Ellis has crafted a perfect Gen X novel. Soundtrack included.

I absolutely cannot say enough good things about the The Shards. It has so many of my favorite elements in it: a serial killer, a close friend group, and an LA backdrop. While the serial killer was a prominent plot point, there were times I was so absorbed in the characters' lives that I forgot there was a killer on the loose. It's a longer book, but it's worth every single word. My advice? Read it on the weekend when you have time to spend hours with Bret and his friends.

Ellis has once again created something to make the censors mad.

This pseudobiographical novel blurs the lines of reality and fiction as we follow Bret himself in what he claims ‘really happened’, against the fictionalised serial killer, The Trawler.

It’s gory, it’s a bit self-indulgent, the cast is privileged; it’s classic BEE. That’s what makes it great.

You’ll be drawn in by the intrigue of finding out some truth to Bret’s youth and connecting his characters to his real life classmates but you’ll stay for the emotional and darkly funny heart of the novel/ memoir.

I'm seeing so much love for this one that I feel like I might have missed something, but at the same time the repetition became a slog for me over time.

This is essentially a literary version of Once Upon in Hollywood, which plays as the BEE origin story or as I blithely thought of it, Bateman Begins. The cool aloofness is mixed with ongoing and somewhat tedious teen dramas blown beyond proportion especially with the lack of adult oversight of any of the teens involved.

It's 1981 and BEE is in senior year at Buckley where he is conducting a relationship with Debbie in order to disguise his ongoing homosexual affairs and fantasies in a time when coming out was not an option. The loss of sexual innocence is played out alongside the loss of innocence as it pertains to violence as BEE becomes wrapped up in a slew of murders committed by a killer dubbed the Trawlerman when a former sexual liaison first disappears, then turns up dead after a series of incidents plays out beforehand similar to other L.A. killings.

That's the simple explanation before you get into the metaficitional side of things as BEE explores his own past works through this new one and it's possibly here where I fall down a bit having read these some time ago and not having a clear memory of Less Than Zero. As it acts as some kind of prequel to Lunar Park, I perhaps should be obliged to hold this up to what is one of my ultimate favourites. LP is simply a bit clearer in its intentions than The Shards is. It's simply too easy to get lulled in and turned off by the ongoing teen relationship dramas that play out for long stretches of the book even as BEE sees the inherent danger of Robert Mallory and what he is doing to BEE's friends and BEE's place within the social structure he's built around himself.

There's plenty of tension in certain scenes especially where BEE brushes with the adult world and doesn't possess the control he has in his own teen world. The sex and violence are suitably hard hitting with both coming hard and fast and gratuitous in service of the story.

If it had only been a shorter story with less of the teen drama litigated over and over then I might be obliged to greet it with the same enthusiasm as others, but who am I to say what is right and wrong.

Could not put it down! A highlight of early 2023 reading (along with Age of Vice). Happy to include it in the January edition of Novel Encounters, my regular column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction, for the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

“How many people were involved in a lie and how long could they keep it going before everything cracked open and the truth spilled out?”


Broken pieces, fragments, coverings. Lies and evasions, personas, participants.

The Shards.

A city built on dreams, endlessly attracting dreamers. A city of escape. A city of any one’s own making.

Everyone has a secret, and nothing is what it seems, and how does one know what’s, well, the truth? What are facts?

Are you living your life, really? Or, are you merely a participant in it? Do you truly know yourself, your friends, your family? And, how can you be sure?


Questions, questions, questions, questions. They never stop, and they build, and roll into one another, becoming entangled, erasing the individual, leaving an inescapable puzzle of a mess.


The Shards is sprawling, paranoid, tempting and unavoidable collision. Everyone is trying to figure out who they are, who they want to be, how they fit into the world, how the individual clashes with the whole. It’s a disturbed remembrance told as fervently as it was experienced, or dreamed, or devised. The events and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Or…

Are they?

The Shards, screamed into the night and furiously committed to page, it feels as real as any secret or trauma being unburdened. Part high school memoir, part confessional, part Murder Show. Everything bleeds together in a complication as true to life as anything.

Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in over a decade both expands and illuminates all that came before, and it’s a force of a novel not easy to put down. Or forget.

But one never does, do they? Never can. Forget.

The Shards will be released on January 17, 2023. Knopf Doubleday provided an early galley for review.

As with some of his other works, Bret Easton Ellis again sets his story in a fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981. This was where he grew up and a time when he was himself seventeen years old. Also, like earlier works, the story is full of detailed sexual exploits and graphic violence.

I had to smile when the book opens with a lyrical quote from one of my favorite songs from the 70's. I took that as a good omen. In fact, I very much enjoy all the music references that Ellis sprinkles in here. These were the bands and songs and albums of my coming of age, just as they were his.

The narrative structure is a very interesting one. Ellis has made himself a character in his own novel - a writer of the same age who has written the exact titles he has in real-life. Ellis' style is again in the very compound/complex sentences that I observed in his earliest work Less Than Zero; previously I attributed it to Clay's disjointed mental states, but I now realize this appears to be a go-to comfort-zone of Ellis' writing. It can lead to some very overly wordy passages though with a lot of repetition. I am also not overly fond of the narrator revealing facts to the reader well before the narrator character has learned them; it just ruins the surprise and mystery of things.

I am certain fans of Ellis' earlier works will be eager to dive into his newest novel. For the uninitiated, this might not be the best jumping on point though.

There are certain things you can always count on being in a Bret Easton Ellis book. One of those things is a group of privileged people. This time though they are getting what they really deserve. Targeted by a serial killer.
Like a lot of Ellis stories, this marks the ending of innocence for some before they turn into adults.
Filled with love, obsession, murders, gross situations, and plenty of twists, the Shards should leave you satisfied.
I always admire the little oddities and humor Ellis manages to slide in his stories.
A lot of ironies.
Fans of Ellis should enjoy.

100% going to be my favorite book of 2023 and easily in my top 10 of books I've ever read in my entire life. I loved how Ellis combined a coming-of-age story with something sinister like The Trawler in this story. Although the serial killer aspect was kind of in the background for most of the story, I found this to be realistic and intensely creepy. I loved the plot and the last 20% had me on the edge of my seat. Incredible!

Less Than Zero is one of my favorite books, so I was super excited to hear about this new one. Alas, this book is a pretty big drag. It's long, really long, with lots of red herrings and side plots that seem to drag on. The affair between Bret and his girlfriend's father plays almost no role in the larger plot and just seems inserted for shock value. The violence is really graphic, especially against animals, in a way that just feels gratuitous. And the conclusion feels unsatisfying and half baked. Overall a pretty big letdown.

The 80’s have barely begun and new high school senior Bret, is just seventeen, and he and his clique of popular cool friends are already jaded, and coasting through life comfortably numb, until things start to get decidedly uncomfortable…

Way long, but pulled me under the bright-lights-of-LA-in-the-early-80’s vibe and I read it in far less time than I had originally anticipated. I watched almost nothing during my reading of this because I didn't want to stop reading - I needed to know. I haven't had this level of antsy excitement about a book in… I don't even know when the last time was.

Seductive, and immersive, heady and wonderfully atmospheric, these are but a few descriptors I can accurately use to describe what I just read. Speaking of, let me be among the many to congratulate the author on a seriously fantastic new novel.


The Shards has a strong recommendation from me, and I’m still not entirely sure what I just read - okay, I just read that this was originally published as a podcast, which I was completely unaware of (I haven’t yet found a podcast that I actually want to listen to, and I gave up looking a few years ago). This story in that format makes sense to me and in my thinking - I would probably recommend listening to the audiobook of this one, as it’s read by the author.


quotes that stood out for me - "Writing this now, I can't believe that I was left to my own devices for twenty minutes, just idly sitting there, thinking about things, about Thom and about Susan, waiting without a phone to look at, waiting without something to distract me."

"Matt had never felt about me the way I'd felt about him, which would be a recurring theme for the rest of my life, though, of course, I didn't know this yet on that September afternoon in 1981, when I was seventeen and still navigated on hope."

I am likely going to be in the minority with this one, but.....ugh.

Look, I too loved my youth, my heyday, my glory days. But, I also know that I need to move on. I fear that BEE might be stuck. I've always enjoyed his writing and past books, but I feel like....it's time to...move on.

The Shards revisits the overdone 80s. This time, BEE is 17, and at a prep school. Sex and sex and murder and sex and more and more sex and drugs.

That's basically the plot, over and over and over.

It's just....it's been done. again and again and again. It's tired. Give me something else. Something new.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This is a difficult one for me to review. I love Bret Easton Ellis. He has been a touchstone on my literary journeys since high school. His singular voice is one that I have always looked forward to and enjoyed. And this is definitely a Bret Easton Ellis novel with all of the things that entails: scathing satire, gruesome violence, explicit sexuality, and commentary on unchecked privilege that is second to none. So, why the three star rating? This book is really long and dense. I didn’t realize that it was basically a transcript of his podcast, as well. The narrative gets bogged down by constant repetition of what came before, which in an episodic form like a podcast, makes sense. Here it just serves to pad an already lengthy read. I can’t help but think with a bit of editing, this book would be hailed as a return to form for Mr. Ellis.

This checked so many boxes for me, I loved it!
While many people refuse to read authors they do not morally align with, I have a big soft spot for Bret Easton Ellis’s fiction. Sometimes it takes an author with a disagreeable contrarian perspective to write morally grey and unlikeable yet fascinating characters as well as he does. It just makes sense.
The Shards is messy, unsettling and suspenseful. From the first page, I was immediately submerged straight into 1980s Southern California. Every time I had to put it down, I wanted to pick it right back up. Highly recommended for fans of Ellis’s previous works and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

*Thank you to Knopf, Bret Easton Ellis and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review*

Previously published at https://www.mysteryandsuspense.com/the-shards/


“We were teenagers distracted by sex and pop music, movies and celebrity, lust and ephemera and our own neutral innocence.”
–Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards

When someone inevitably asks you at the end of the year, what is the best book you have read this year? Sometimes you go through all the books you have read and you come up with two or three. But this time, I only have one. The Shards is the best book I read this year. As one reader so eloquently put it, this book is phenomenal. Despite the length, graphic sex and animal violence, it was “unputdownable”.

Bret Easton Ellis stars as himself in this semi-autobiographical (yet only partially true) book from his point of view as a 17yo living on his own and attending an elite private school in 1981 in Beverly Hills. In the fall of Bret’s senior year of high school, him and his small circle of friends attend Buckley, a private school in Sherman Oaks. They spend their free time doing drugs, having sex, going to the movies and swimming. The music and movies of this period are so well described by Ellis, that you almost want to listen to the soundtrack while reading the book. Robert Mallory attends Buckley on their first day of senior year and fits into Bret’s friend group effortlessly. Bret, a closeted gay teenager, is enthralled with how handsome and smart Robert is. But when Bret recognizes him from a movie theater, he saw him over a year ago, Robert lies to him. Bret becomes obsessed with him, drawing parallels between Robert and the Trawler, a serial killer targeting young adults in early 1980s Los Angeles. Interestingly, there was a serial killer called the Trawler in that time period, though they targeted the elderly. When he tries to warn his friends, they accuse him of embellishing, which he does in his early writing.

The Shards is nothing if not complex, with several different storylines. The plot includes general nostalgia of Los Angeles in the ‘80s; Bret’s own coming of age story about being a closeted gay teen writing his first novel (which turns into Less Than Zero) but also about a serial killer targeting teens and young adults, and their pets. Mr. Ellis narrates the story but is also the protagonist. His group of friends include Thom White, a handsome football player who is not too bright, White’s girlfriend, the amazing and beautiful but very cold Susan Reynolds, Bret’s girlfriend, Debbie Schaffer, a nagging, coke addicted girl whom he does not seem to care for or have much interaction with besides sex and drugs. Matt Kellner and Ryan Vaughn, on the fringe of his group, both of whom he has had sexual relations with, though neither are gay. All of them have non-existent relationships with their parents, who are mostly absent. Bret’s own parents have left for months to go on vacation and he frequently refers to his home as “the empty house on Mulholland”, though his maid, Rosa, seems to care about him. One interesting thing I thought about the adults in this novel, is that they all treat their teenagers like adults, confiding in them, hitting on their friends and imbibing in drugs and alcohol in front of them, with no cares at all. Ellis captures this empty existence brilliantly and as the reader, you are caught up in their numbness. He drives around in his expensive cars a lot, by himself, and describes left turns, right turns, what the areas look like, and only Ellis could write this and make it fascinating.

This is, without a doubt, the best book I have read this year (and maybe last year). Do I think there could have been less animal violence; yes, it seemed gratuitous but didn’t take away from my overall feel of the book. The author has the innate ability to take you back to a time and place, talking about the music, clothing, hair, movies, and makes you feel you are actually in that place at that time. His writing in The Shards feels so personal and the plot, brilliant. There are a lot of graphic sexual situations, animal cruelty and repetitiveness but none of that matters as you read this. While Ellis insists these events happened, it doesn’t really matter in this case because maybe the story is more fascinating than the actual truth.