Rating: 
Summary: Good Book, Bad Hype
Review: The book doesn't go anywhere but paints a decent picture of a psycho in the late '80's. It's a black-comedy tour-de-force of pseudo-sociopathic chaos with a soul-less main character but although the gore and sex is extreme it doesn't add to the quality.
Rating: 
Summary: The satirization of 1980, psychomaniacal, urban yuppie life.
Review: This isn't really a review. I have read the book and I, personally, found it disturbing. But, I think it has its place in the book industry. I am submitting this entry to ask a question that I am deeply puzzled by. There is a part in the book where he slaughters a character, I believe his name is Owen. Owens apartment is all messed up from Bateman and later in the book he goes to visit the place, I think to store more body parts and the apartment is cleaned up. The part that confuses me is the conversation between Bateman and the realator. I got the impression that she knew about the blood on the walls and the conversation kind of went unspoken. The reason why it's so confusing is because nobody supposedly knows about his psychopathic life. If anyone out there has read this book and understands that part or at least has a take on it, please!, elaborate. Thank you.
Rating:
Summary: Raymond Chandler.. move over
Review: Many on this forum really can't decide if this book is literature or a prurient tease masquerading as literature (or worse). Despite some previous reviews, Ellis' portrait does not provide a masterful character development of the psychopathic personality or an illustrative text of the corrupting influence of yuppie materialism. The book is a rather well written narrative of the adventures of a young urban professional sadistic murderer in New York in the 1980's. His expose of a yuppie lifestyle amounts to a listing of the expensive paraphenalia (Rolex's, bench made shoes, etc.), and an obtuse music review. The sexual and sadistic sequences are delivered with about as much emotion or scintillation as one would expect from reading a grocery list. Indicative of a soiciopathic personality I guess. The book tries to be provacative, but my jaded sensibilities refuse to be shocked. There is little penetration and profundity here which would qualify this as literature, little even to recommend it as social commentary. Trying to give this transcendental or existential credentials is a bit of a stretch. Taken as a pulpy piece of noire murder mystery (with the mystery taken out) though, I suppose it has its charms. It is in that company and genre that the book deserves a 4 star rating.
Rating:
Summary: TURN ON THE LITERARY BRAIN...
Review: After reading about 300 of the reveiws on this site, I noticed a prevalent theme of people becoming annoyed with the miutia described throughout this book. Does any one out there believe that this may be essential in the character development of Patrick Bateman? Let alone in the devolopment of the environment of New York in the mid-to-late 80's? Even though I fully understand not wanting to read the chapters devoted to Huey Lewis and the like, is it not fair to say that this could reflect the unwelcome feeling of neuroses for Bateman? I enjoyed this book for that reason, I thought that the endless descriptions of clothing and food were tedious, but the idea of a person so facinated by this is interesting. Imagine meeting a person that is facinated with the pattern of a leaf, so much so that he lives his life according to a "map" he has manifested from the patterns he knows. I would be interested in hearing his/her slant on how the remainder of the world appears. Granted NYC is the extreme, but I think that is also a part of Bateman's character, through all of the false anononimity the city seems to offer he is still an outsider. I was interested in one reviewer's comment about all of the men and women being alike, consequently this could be another reason supporting the excessive focus on the materialistic aspects throughout the book. Overall I thought this was a fast and entertaining read- even though I hate to admit that I received any entertainment from such abuse.
Rating:
Summary: Eighties yuppie culture taken apart by Easton Ellis
Review: This book may appear, at first glance, to be a simple serial-killer-diaries gore-fest. But this is not the case. This novel is a scathing indictment of the Eighties, and the capitalist culture that went with it. Brilliantly written, with passages describing exactly how many abdominal crunches the protagonist Bateman does at the gym, the reader is let into Bateman's mind, where obsessive compulsive disorder floats around, sometimes giving way to a psychotic mindset. Yes, some scenes are grotesque, but the sheer hate at work is what matters, being a product of the environment. The zeitgeist is sufficiently evoked by chapters relating to Bateman's casual music tastes, primarily Huey Lewis and the News, and Genesis. These chapters once again reveal Bateman's mindset, proving he is an obsessive. Beginning with the words ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE and ending with the statement THIS IS NOT AN EXIT, this book represents all that is good about hindsight: we can realise our society's (and our own) mistakes.
Rating:
Summary: Horrifying
Review: Probably one of the best books of this decade. It just penetrates the mind, and you start to think like Patrick Bateman, and that's when you start to get really frightened. I definitely makes you look at things in a new perspctive.
Rating: 
Summary: Is 'American Psycho' transcendental?
Review: Insofar as BEE's novel "American Psycho" is extreme in its violent content, can one say that the violence serves a higher purpose? Meaning, does the violence transcend the arena of 'shock value' to effectively comment on how pervassive misogyny is in our culture? I believe Patrick Bateman to be a character at once caught up in the thrill of his killings, yet is unable to stop because (among other things) they go unnoticed in NYC. So, one could say that the violence in the novel serves to comment on how oblivious society is to its own members, and how Patrick is angered by societies self-absorption and is thus 'feed' by it. I think that the violence of the novel, if viewed in this way, becomes transcendental, or crosses the line of pure shock value to make a comment on how society as a whole, and individual members of it react to and with one another. The graphic nature of the novel is so extreme that it speaks for itself. It says plainly: Look what goes on (and one need only reference the daily news to confirm that acts like this have occured against women, I offer the violence of serial killers, Arthur Shawcross; The Hillside Strangler and Ted Bundy as examples) in YOUR society and you are too absorped with yourself, your drugs, your life and your reservation at Elaine's to notice or investigate. BEE's use of outside forces in his characters killing (namely, pornography) are examples that his work is well researched, and not intended solely for shock value. Ted Bundy, after all, left a sizable amount of money to the Anti-Pornography League after his death.
Rating: 
Summary: Thanks for your $13 sucker!
Review: God!, what a waste of time and paper this thing is. After the first 100 pages I was wishing Bateman would come and shoot me in the head with the nail gun and put an end to my misery. I've never thrown out a book before, but my copy of this stinker is now residing under the used diapers at the county land fill. To save any prospective readers the horrific suckage of this thing here's the Cliff Notes version; -Hi I'm a yuppie scumbag -Hi I'm a yuppie scumbag chopping up bodies -Repeat above for 400 pages This book is PRODUCT. There is nothing going on here. There is no story here. There are no characters here. The shock Ellis tries to create is all there is to this book. Unfortunately the carnage and designer wardrobe name dropping wears thin when you realize that the story has no where to go. I have to laugh at the people who write that this is great satire or social criticism. What's the point?; Yuppies are self absorbed morons? We live in a society of excess? What genius! Erect a statue of Ellis next to Hemingway and Miller! What an ass he is, I hope he doesn't take himself seriously! American Psycho is totally simple and totally lame, if you buy into it you are a complete Tool.
Rating: 
Summary: Less Than Zero Revisited
Review: Okay Bret, let's see if I have the formula straight:1. Take the soul-less, decadent teens of Less Than Zero. 2. Fast forward 7 years. 3. Change their names and transplant them from SoCal to New York. 4. Make (keep) them rich. 5. Add the requisite abuse of alcohol and drugs. 6. "Shock" the reader with the many ways Patrick "Slice-matic" Bateman can shred different body parts. Add the special touch of killing a kid. 7. Dedicate two irrelevant chapters to Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News, either to piss off the reader or indulge the author's ego. 7. Rent the best selling porn video and transcribe the scenes, making Bateman stud du jour. 8. Make sure no real cops get in the way of Bateman's hobby, that way he's still on the loose at the end (written in 1991, this shows great vision! What, with the movie coming out, this keeps the option open for a sequel). I'll allow you this Bret, your book gave new meaning (literal and figurative) to the word "overkill". My rating? Well, let's just say it's not less than zero and it's not a ten.
Rating:
Summary: The Positive Aspects of Negative Thinking
Review: This book seems to be a waste of time when you start to read all those brands and the daily stuff of Bateman. But before you comment on something think it twice... Is this what we will have in near future. Misery, greed etc and the bad instincts controlling our movements but not our positive thougts. I guess this book is more than a novel but a science fiction.
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