Book Review: "Lunar Park" by Bret Easton Ellis

Most people would probably give Bret Easton Ellis' newest novel Lunar Park a chance if the titles Less than Zero, The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho ring a bell. Ellis wrote all of these controversial, yet wildly popular and critically acclaimed novels, as well as The Informers and Glamorama. Although it would appear that Ellis has left behind the world of psycho killers and the crazy drug-addled lives of college students - both of those topics make more than an appearance in Park.

The book is written in a semi-autobiographical voice; the lead character is also named Bret Easton Ellis who is also famous for having written the same books. The first chapter is fabulously entertaining as the (fictional?) Ellis recaps the past few decades of his life. At the height of his fame he was admittedly "snorting maybe forty bags of heroin" a day and having the drug cop the publisher hired for his book tour write memos like, "Somehow writer has been tear-gassed at anti-globalization demonstration in Chicago."

The novel picks up in the present day, which finds Ellis married to Jayne - whom he dated nearly a decade before - for three months. They have a son named Robby, who is 11. They live together in a suburban mansion with Robby, who doesn't call Ellis "dad" and with Jayne's child Sarah, who calls him "dad" even though he isn't.

Ellis isn't only trying to kick his drug habit; he's also working on becoming a father. However, in the span of 12 days everything starts going to hell. First, furniture starts rearranging itself in the shape of Ellis' boyhood home, followed by mysterious emails sent by the bank where his father's ashes are kept, to a killer mimicking the events of American Psycho, and finally demons from Bret's imagination start to infest the house.

According to various interviews, the real-life Ellis is a big Stephen King fan and it shows in the gory parts. Unfortunately, Ellis seems to be riffing off more of King's Dreamcatcher material than anything substantial. For example, does Sarah's mechanical Terby doll really have to come alive and possess the family dog by entering from, shall we say, the rear?

Ellis' expertise is social commentary and his deadpan way of describing society's ills, not horror. The demon attacks and mysterious person appearances start to drag on for so long, one sort of wishes they would just kill Bret and put him out of his misery.

Whenever the hero of the story isn't being stalked by the ghost of his father or the Terby isn't flying around is when the novel gets interesting. While one half of the book is a horror story, the other is a razor-sharp satire of children forced to grow up too quickly and the clueless parents surrounding them. At a parent/teacher conference Ellis and his wife are told that Sarah's platypus drawing for her first grade class should look "less deranged" and should look more like the "average platypus." It is suggested by the teacher that perhaps there is too much stress at home and that all parents are encouraged to take the "complimentary stress basket" with them.
Ellis isn't afraid to make fun of himself either, explaining that his new novel will be about a self-proclaimed "sexpert" who "dates only models" and carries "a large bag filled with various lubricants" and the book will "contain at least a hundred sex scenes." All of this is an obvious homage to the critical backlash American Psycho received for allegedly sensationalizing gore to sell copies.

Although Lunar Park may not go a long way in ridding Ellis of his American Psycho stigma, it is autobiographical in not only the sense that it shines a light on Ellis' life but also highlights his talents and weaknesses in writing.

Grade: B

This article was published in The Marquette Tribune on September 15, 2005.