Rating: 
Summary: Over-rated and over-hyped
Review: Yes, this book is very well-written. Ellis has a vivid and engaging style of writing. I honestly don't have a problem with all the violence. Though violence for the sake of violence is simply boring and repetitive, which is the case here. The story as a whole goes nowhere. (In this way it's similar to Rules of Attraction, another book without momentum in any direction.) I don't care for or even hate Patrick Bateman. He doesn't evoke any feeling at all. Ellis' fans are cultish in their fantac support of him and this book. I combed through many of the reviews looking for a coherent argument in support of the book that even provides a basic explanation of Ellis' point, and found none.Yes, Consumer Society can be bad. Read The Baffler if you want to know why. If you want to plumb the dark depths of the human soul read someone like Hubert Selby Jr. or Nelsen Algren. They do so in an artful and heartfelt way. For male emasculation, read Fight Club. Don't go to Ellis for any of this. You'll only be wasting your time.
Rating: 
Summary: Patrick Bateman is a metaphor
Review: I found one readers review that he enjoyed the violence against women in the book, profoundly disturbing. The point Ellis is trying to make is that Americans have become so bloodthirsty and greedy that they will stop at nothing in the pursuit of materialism, and the allmighty dollar. The violence in the book is merely the only way that Ellis can communicate with such a desensitized population. If you want to get a message through to someone you have to speak their language, and Americans seem only to respond well to graphic, senseless violence. It seems though that many people, the very people Ellis was trying to get through to, have missed the point entirely and end up reading the book or watching the movie for the violence anyway. American Psycho, is actually a critique of current western values, wrapped in the plot of a 'horror flick.' This is easily apparent because so many of the characteristics of western society that Ellis disdains are exaggerated to such a degree in the characters, that it becomes humorous. Ellis is trying to make the characters shallowness look ridiculous so you notice it. For example all they care about is what restaurant they get reservations at, or what type of clothes they are wearing. Patrick Bateman is the epitome of everything mean and nasty that capitalism encompasses. The city he lives in, New York, is the money capital of the world, and his job on wallstreet speaks for itself, greed. The results of capitalism, money worship, are found in the shallowness of the characters in the book. When the characters are portrayed as selfish, insensitive, materialistic, fake, greedy, envious, petty, Ellis is saying this is the end result of a society held together with nothing but greed, this is capitalism. If the economy fell apart, if no one was receiving their paychecks and they could afford fastfood and the cable television that keeps them happily numb, America would go into chaos. Greed is the glue that binds American society together, not a sense of belonging or togetherness or collectivism, not any other goal higher then the pursuit of wealth. Patrick Bateman is symbolic of capitalism itself, heartless, with really no purpose in life other then to climb the latter. Every point of view that Patrick Bateman professes is manufactured. Whatever the latest trend, or the p.c. thing to say is, that is what will come out of Patrick Bateman's mouth. The sad part is that he doesn't believe in anything at all. Patrick Bateman does not care about anti-semitism or womens rights, he pretends to because he thinks people will like him for it. He is a heartless, manufactured individual, just like american society is heartless and fake. To Bateman, there is no cause greater then serving himself. There is nothing that he would fight for, except money, and I think this is what Ellis is saying, he's saying American society is heartless, fake, there is no greater purpose or nobler goal that all of us in society are working towards. He is saying that money is the only value, human beings are not valued, money is. This is shown in the book when Patrick Bateman jokingly asks one of the prostitutes, "Do you take credit card?" This is showing how Bateman does not see the woman as a human, but as just another commodity to be bought and sold. This is the end result of capitalism, that everything is measured by the dollar, there becomes no other value, no higher ideology. It's not an accident that America is in, and has been for some time now, a mental health crisis. Prozac and Zoloft are being prescribed at an unprecidented rate. The environment we live in, is not a healthy, natural environment for human beings. Among a myriad of things, the pursuit of success and money causes the pace of life to become faster and faster, more stressful and it sucks the lifeblood right out society. Ellis could of easily called the book something other then AMERICAN psycho, but he wanted to emphasis that America IS going psycho. Another good book turned movie that criticizes society is Fight Club. Fight Club too is symbolic, it's not a movie about fighting, rather it is a critique of American society and capitalism in specific. Notice that at the end of the movie the credit card buildings are blown up to erase the debt record, create total chaos and usher in a workers revolution. Anyway, I hope that there are intelligent people out there who will see beyond the blood and gore, and interpret the message that Ellis is trying to send, probably not. Ellis could of easily written in plain english his criticism of American society but then it would of ended up in a different genre, only being read by intellectuals, certaintly not being made into a movie, and the general population would never get the message. I hope they get the message some day and wake up. The message is we are heading down a slippery slope with no sign of slowing down. As Oswald Spengler predicted, Western culture is collapsing.
Rating:
Summary: American Classic
Review: American Psycho is a book I would praise to people whom I nevertheless cannot imagine reading it. I have friends who haven't been able to finish some of Stephen King's works, and they certainly wouldn't make it through AP. People usually associate meticulous descriptions of grisly murders and sadistic sex with cheap dime-novel fiction: yet this is an extremely clever and well-crafted book. It's hard to say which scenes are more explicit, those describing with obscenely rough sex or those with grotesquely detailed dismemberments, shocking in their violence. For all that, the proof of the book's quality is that it nevertheless manages to tell a story, satirize mercilessly the yuppies of the 1980s, and at the end even offer a faint glimmer of hope for the novel's psychotic antihero, Patrick Bateman. Definitely a read not to be missed - if you're up to the challenge.
Rating: 
Summary: well written but not a woman's book
Review: I agree it is a well written book. I agree it has a great plot, I even agree it makes a statement about America. What I feel I must underscore is that this book is UTTERLY GRAPHIC in its representation of what this man does to his female victims. It is not simply gore, it is not simply horror, it is not simply rape or murder or mutilation...I can handle all of those. It is some of the most disturbing deconstruction of the female anatomy I have ever read. Women who read it should only do so with the warning to read it in small doses and in broad daylight with only trustworthy people around. I read it at night and had horrid nightmares because the descriptions are just that graphic. I am a book lover to a GREAT degree, so I cannot in good conscience throw my copy away, but I will never sell it to a used bookstore because I want to keep my copy from falling into someone's hands.
Rating:
Summary: Bret Easton Ellis is an asset to American literature.
Review: I'll start off by saying that I'm a feminist, and reading this book made me like Ellis any more or any less. There's no question that his corporate 1980's yuppie character Patrick Bateman is a misogynist, but the book's called American Psycho, not American Normal Man. And Patrick Bateman is certainly a psycho. Instead of being portrayed as some raving, maniacally laughing lunatic, Patrick is seemingly normal. He's a wealthy young Wall Street type with a girlfriend and a nice apartment, but he's also a serial killer. There are some pretty disgusting descriptions of Bateman's murders and violent sexual escapades, but should be no more shocking than Anais Nin or D.H. Lawrence were in their time. I think Ellis is a brilliant other who has an excellent grasp of the "show, don't tell," aspect of writing. This novel contains a good amount of satire, one of the most memorable examples occuring when Batemen coats a urinal mint in chocolate and then places it in a Godiva box. His status-conscious girlfriend insists on eating the chocolate once she sees that it's Godiva, and won't admit to how awful it tastes. All in all, I think this will be come a sort of twisted American classic, much like A Clockwork Orange.
Rating:
Summary: Wall Street and the 1980s Darkly Deconstructed
Review: Buyer Beware! "American Psycho" is not for the squimish! If you cannot read extensive descriptions of people being murdered or violent sex, stay away. For all others, this is the book for you.
Patrick Bateman, the protagonist, is the kind of man women dream about. He is charming, handsome and incredibly wealthy, but he has a dark secret, he's a murderer. Ellis wonderfully critiques the self - absorbedness of 80s Wall Street culture, the decadence of NYC yuppies and just humanity in general. What was so intriguing about "American Psycho" was the way Ellis was able to weave humor into so many of the scenes involving Patrick, but this was also a risky move. As much as I wanted to hate Patrick for all the heinous things he did, I could not stop liking his character because he was so charming and had a wonderful sarcastic sense of humor. My only complaint is that some parts of the book dragged on a bit too much. For example, while the scenes in which Patrick and his co-workers compare business cards are extremely entertaining, the four page descriptions of people's clothing and what food they ate, got a little tedious after a while. I also found myself asking "why?" a lot. I think the book could have been a lot better if Ellis allowed the reader to get inside Patrick's head more often. Even though the book is written in the first person, I still felt that certain parts of Patrick's psyche were off limits to the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Monster's Ball Masterpiece
Review: Meet Patrick Bateman -- Wall Street wunderkind, Harvard-educated, $180,000 per year gross earner, ladies' man, Donald Trump fan, firm fixture of what once would have been called "the Smart Set." Patrick has the world by the tail. He is a member of the creme de la creme of American society. His horizon has nothing but blue skies to be seen. Except for the fact that Patrick is a sadistic serial killer who tortures victims to death, then performs acts of necrophilia and cannibalism on their bodies. Perhaps. For, you see, Patrick can't be sure what's real and what isn't any longer. He's not even sure if he himself exists, although he knows that some of the hallucinatory visions he witnesses cannot possibly be real. This book is inevitably bound to be Bret Easton Ellis's major work and, just as inevitably, bound to elicit heated denunciations from people infuriated and appalled by the graphic depictions of extreme violence, sexual intercourse and misogyny peppered throughout. Pat Bateman is a frightening avatar of late Eighties' Yuppiedom, the ethic of red-in-claw-and-tooth Social Darwinism raised by exponential proportions. His deeds are so revolting -- and so lovingly detailed -- that we cannot possibly contain our horror. The problem is that American society is now full of Patrick Batemans. Indeed, we celebrate our Batemans, wishing their ruthlessness for our own. Look no further than the excesses of reality television for confirmation of this psychotic love affair. There are some very intriguing hints about Bateman's true psychological state of being. Easton Ellis, who quotes Dostoevsky in the book's preface, makes heavy use of that writer's doppelganger idea in "The Double." People in Patrick Bateman's world are forever being mistaken for someone else. Identities are as fluid as quicksilver. Clothes literally make the man. Patrick obsessively recounts the clothing worn by the people he works with, recreates with and kills. Patrick sees very little beyond those surface qualities and it's clear that he's no different from his peers in this regard. The irony, of course, is that Patrick's psychosis, as it grows, leaves him less and less sure about what lies beneath his own surface trappings of clothes and a well-toned body. Easton Ellis savages the twisted moral underpinnings of yuppie cafe society of the 1980s. Its vapidity is symbolized by Bateman's paeans to the musical artists he thinks define the decade -- Genesis, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis & the News -- and by the insanely banal dialogue between characters. The artifice of Bateman's world is on tedious display upon the tables of the many trendy restaurants in which the novel primarily unfolds, all of them serving expensive nouvelle cuisine that no sane person would feed a cat, much less a human being. The ephemeral nature of Bateman's world can be found in the empty store fronts where once hot restaurants have closed, leaving only a void in their wake. The fundamental yuppie inversion of morals -- namely money over humanity -- is on display as Patrick and his pals cruelly offer homeless beggars money, only to snatch it away from them. Babbitry, that most American blindness to moral outrage, will undoubtedly keep this novel from reaching an audience who should have to think through its frightening implications. Potential readers will always have Easton Ellis's alternately lascivious and repulsive scenes of sex and slaughter upon which they can construct principled arguments for not reading such reviling material. But in doing so, they miss a devastating critique and ultimate rejection of the evils undermining our society. "American Psycho" isn't an easy read; it's a necessary one.
Rating:
Summary: A Societal Purgative
Review: American Psycho acts as a purgative for society's interest
in extremes. Or at least, it should. You should walk
away from this book disgusted by extreme sex, violence, narcissism, decadence,cursing, and consuming. The book
has several drawn out sections cataloguing hair care,
physcial fitness, and even contemporary(for the 80's)
music reviews. This annoys most readers but the mistake
is to not notice that it is on purpose.
Ellis is attepting something similar to what the Natural Born Killers project should have done. By
flooding the reader with all of these images and banal descriptions of incredibly vile behavior, Ellis might
actually purge the desire from society. The music
reviews are supposed to be boring and pretentious. The
list of superficial health practices is supposed to be
long, invovled and dull. And the violence should be
both overwhelming and yet horrific in its
understatement.
Consider a passage where a homosexual confronts
the the protagonist Patrick Bates. Normally, Bates
would push this man aside and maybe even kill him.
But he is so struck by the man's love for him that he
is almost afraid and cannot leave the situation fast
enough. Bates can't feel. Bates moves through his
world with a veneer of beauty covering a corrupt,empty
life. His descriptions of murder do not engage him any
more than his description of a day at the office.
Bates is no predator-he is an automaton.
The book is appropraitely entitled "American
Psycho". Bates is a psycho, is diseased in a way that
is wholly American. It is not just the violent acts that
should turn off the reader. It is every thing he does
in his day to day life. I subtracted a star because
Ellis wasn't able to get his point across to most
readers. Also, the book simply ends without a real
conclusion. I could let him off the hook by saying
that it ends the way the 80s did-without a big finale,
merely the truning over of a new calender page; but we
expect for having put up with the excesses of the book.
In summation, if you can withstand the extremes
of the novel, you might walk away cured and swear off
the casual excesses in your own life. Those being
everyday narcissim, everyday acceptance or enjoyment
of casual t.v. violence, and mock culture. Like a
1000 word book review on Amazon when you should be
reading Shakespeare.
Rating: 
Summary: couldnt think of a title
Review: When I bought the book American Psycho to read, my thoughts were about the movie "American Psycho" based on the book. I remember the movie seeming very out of the ordinary and weird, so that is how I felt about the book going into the reading. I could not have been more wrong. The book is a completely different experience from the movie. If you have only seen the movie, you have only experienced about a quarter of the real story. The book is somewhat of a dark comedy that takes you deep into the mind of Patrick Bateman, a symbol of perfection in the professional world in the nineteen eighties. His perfection, though, is only the outer shell of Bateman. It is only a part he plays in the movie of life. Inside of himself, he is completely empty, and devoid of any sort of human emotion. That is the other side of his world, as a maniacal serial killer. The reader is slowly taken into this side of Bateman. You are aware that he is killing people, but they are not described directly to you at the beginning of the book. His exploits into the world of sex and murder are described extremely graphically in the book. The tamest glimpse of these scenes occurs when Bateman attacks a homeless man by pulling "out a long, thin knife with a serrated edge and, being very careful not to kill him, push[ing] maybe half of an inch of the blade into his right eye, flicking the handle up, instantly popping the retina." These scenes from the book could never be put into a movie due to their graphic content. Despite their nature, these murder and sex scenes become commonplace as the book progresses. Just like the rest of the book, these scenes are meticulously described in first person in order for the reader to grasp how emotionless Bateman really is. Weaving its way throughout the story is another sub-story that is a satire, which continuously pokes fun at the entire eighties' culture. Bateman describes every outfit of every person he comes into contact with. That was the only real complaint that I had about the book. Although I believe that it is a necessary part of the book, in order for it to make fun of the eighties' culture, it was just a little too much for me. On this same point, there are entire chapters over musical careers of artists like Genesis and Whitney Houston that are obviously in place to show Bateman's obsessions to the reader. I felt that overall this book was wonderfully done. To me the book was not a page-turner that I could not put down. It did, however, take me completely into the world and mind of Bateman where I was detached from my own reality. I enjoyed being able to travel into that world so easily. The beginning of the book was a little slow, but it set up the story and slowly revealed Bateman to the reader. The last 150 pages did, however, capture my attention, and I could not put it down until I finished it. I would recommend this book to whoever is slightly interested in it, or to anyone who is interested in this genre of writing.
Rating:
Summary: Incredibly Disturbing
Review: I bought this book having no idea what was in store. If I had known the violence thats was going to be depicted in this book I would have never read it. Although the book is disgusting it still is very engrossing and weel writen, you can't put it down. Some parts like the long descriptions of bands and clothing did get rather tedious though. I do not recommend this to readers who cannot stomach violence or to young readers. The people at the book store did not warn me about the book's content and let me, a 14 year old, buy it. While appreciating the books integrity, I wish I had never read it.
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