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Lunar Park
: First of all let me say that I read Lunar Park in about 36 hours. This book completely consumed me for the duration of its 307 pages. The fascination of what actually happened to the author himself versus the Bret Easton Ellis character he creates quickly draws the reader into the novel (although I am not sure someone who has not read his other five books, as I have, appreciates the details as much). Then the quick departure from Ellis' normal existance of drug-addiction, alcoholism and sex is modified within his new life in suburban Midland County, USA. As a series of disturbing events begin to take place, Ellis finds himself withdrawing from his new life as a family man then desperately trying to keep this same life intact. This book is scarier than other Ellis novels due to its introduction of supernatural phenomena rather than purely disturbing details of the lives of young, rich and pyschotic people. I can see how many Ellis fans are disappointed by the book's strong egression from his typical themes, but it stands on its own as a captivating story well worth reading.
"Lunar Park" should be read as the 6th and latest experiment in a lifelong thesis by its author Bret Easton Ellis. One by one the literary reviewers, with their thumbs -up/thumbs-down approach to criticism, have fallen predictably into line and written its final chapter.
Ellis is an extreme moralist writer who understands that the failure of this genre has been in the effective communication of its message through its chosen literary medium, the Parable.
Ellis has been conducting an in-depth exploration, since the early 90s, into the "Parable", and how it can be tailored more effective as a means of communication. Ellis has gone about this in a much disciplined manner. He has taken the literary "novel", as an art form, and over the space of four novels (LTZ, TROA, AP & TI) has slowly chipped away literary conventions to try and indirectly get his message across. Ellis, as a moralist, has no mercy and he discovered that for a modern parable to be effective it must be merciless. This came to its natural crescendo in "American Psycho" when he discovered that a merciless parable, when misunderstood, can result in its main focus becoming the writer, not the parable.
Ellis, learning from the aftermath of "American Psycho", turned his attention to this celebrity world in his following novel "Glamorama" which ultimately failed as he himself couldn't escape his now own "celebrity" writing style. "Glamorama", in my opinion, whilst satirical in a conventional way, is his most populist book.There was no where for Ellis to go, he couldn't "detach" from his novels anymore. Ellis had become merciful
As almost a direct result of the disappointment of "Glamorama", "Lunar Park" has no mercy at all. "Lunar Park" has no feelings for any human expectations that you may have from this supposed "semi-autobiographical" novel. Ellis has quietly removed his heart from his sleeve in the only way he knew possible, by becoming as disciplined as he was during the writing of "American Psycho" and by trying to invent a novel that can release the author from the trap of stylistic expectation. By inserting a man called Bret Easton Ellis as the main character in this novel Ellis is not breaking new literary ground nor is he achieving any great stylistic liberation. Ellis has tried to move beyond this by slowly removing the "narrator" (i.e the writing, descriptive voice of the "real" Bret Easton Ellis) from outside the novel to become a major part of the dramatis personae of the book. Ellis has tried to create a complete work of fiction in every respect, including the narrator (i.e what we imagine is the descriptive voice of the "real" Easton Ellis. We have no problem believing that the man called Bret Easton Ellis in the book is fiction; a trip to his website will illustrate this clearly. However we still remain under the power of the traditional "narrator" of the book. Why wouldn't we? If we can't trust that convention, what can we trust? The narrator at the beginning of "Lunar Park" and also reintroduced in parts at the end is part of the fiction and it is behind the smokescreen of these two distinctly different but fictional "Bret Easton Ellis" characters that he manages to achieve his disappearing act and write his parable. But a parable it is and there are no facts present, no matter what you feel at the end, you truthfully know nothing more about Bret Easton Ellis than you did when you opened page 1. This complete fiction does however contain an underlying parable about father son relationships and about dealing with loss which is definitely worth the effort he has made to communicate to his readers.
While undoubtedly a superior experiment to "Glamorama" this novel falls short of his "American Psycho" parable and may turn out to be his last, as you can only reinvent yourself so many times before you return to your original form.
 Some are already dubbing this quasi-autobiographical book "a classic" and a few reviewers seem in substance to be saying it is the most brutally frank laying bare of the heart since the Confessions of Augustine. Don't buy into that! This terrible waste of perfectly good blank paper is nothing more than Ellis indulging his love for his own ego, and accomplishing two things at once: turning out another book after being off the literary scene for nearly a decade, and getting himself talked about once again, this time by making his main character, more or less, himself.
Ellis can write. Rules of Attraction and American Psycho prove that. And that's why I have so little patience with this man who wasted my time back in college when I read Glamorama, and now did it again with this cliche-ridden goes-nowhere commercial for his own past books. This story about a writer (Ellis himself) and his miserable life with his estranged son, dead father, unhappy ex-lovers and pursued college girls is, I kid you not, a really, really bad read right down to its apparently possessed stuffed animal and annoyingly under-utilized re-visit from Patrick Bateman.
No, Bret, the good times I had reading the novels you wrote that I actually liked will not get me to give you one more star on this piece of junk, not even out of sympathy. You can do way better than this. Please do.
The first thirty to thirty five pages are everything an Ellis fan could possibly want but the novel slowly devolves into a horror story that, unfortunately, fails to captivate. I've read every one of his novels to this point, with Less than Zero and American Psycho two of my favorite books of all time, but this book, while I eagerly anticipated it, is just not up to those standards. It is a different novel altogether in that it is not a social commentary and is decidedly more personal and I'm not against this new direction for Bret, every artist and writer must evolve, but this is just not a great book. If you are a fan, you must pick this up, but if you are just a casual reader Bret has better books.
 Bret Easton Ellis is one of my favorite writers. All of his books (except THE INFORMERS) are brilliant. I got an advance reading copy of LUNAR PARK a few months ago. I'm so disappointed. The beginning and the end are AMAZING, but the rest is just a bad Stephen King novel. The whole middle section is extremely tedious, and honestly, pretty dumb. For this we had to wait seven years? What a bummer.
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