Empty Cage

I always write my reviews for things long after I’ve read, listened to or watched them. Which is always a shame, because I think something is lost, all those gritty details that let me shell shocked at the time slipping through my fingers. But I want to start writing reviews for the books I’ve read and American Psycho was the last book that scarred me enough to write a review on it.

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

An opening line fit both for American Psycho, and incidentally the gates of hell. American Psycho is not a book written for the faint of heart, but on the other hand I would be genuinely frightened to meet a person who wasn’t at least slightly repulsed by it. Even myself, an openly desensitized jackass, had to admit it was unnerving to the point where you just have to put it down for a moment and let your brain cool off.

The book is about a serial killer. Though, not your average foaming at the mouth sort of serial killer. Patrick Bateman is always cool, calm, and collected in public, though for probably no other reason than the fact that he is completely mad. A well off yuppie who the world has made so cold that violent executions do not seem to touch him at all.

I think the most effective part of the book is how meticulous it is. Ellis paces the story in a way that you really get into Patrick’s head as he itemizes people based on how expensive their attire is. It demonstrates amazingly well how inhuman he sees them. Perhaps, however, it is not that he sees them as inhuman, but himself as above human. At one point Patrick soliloquizes:

“I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning”

This insight of Bateman’s perhaps tells more of the story than his gruesome attacks ever could. He simply cannot feel. This is what adds much more interest to the end of the book. (If you have not read American Psycho, and plan on eventually reading it, skip the next paragraph).

It is when Patrick starts to question his own honesty, and if he has really committed the crimes that he starts to get concerned. It is not that he is worried about whether or not his victims have died, but rather if finally his sanity is giving out. And how breathtakingly honest this is. We don’t care about other people, only ourselves.

All in all, I would be hesitant to lend American Psycho to some people due to the graphic content. But in all honesty if you can get past that this is one hell of a book.