To call this novel a thriller wouldn't be right. Yet it wouldn't be right to call it high class either. In truth it sinks lower than anything ever written, and that is what makes American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, one of the most intelligent books I've ever read (and I read Pynchon). The book follows: and makes you grow to love and hate, New York 26 year old Patrick Bateman, psychotic murderer and brother of Sean Bateman, who, during the 80s, went on a coke fueled killing spree... or so you think. The sadness of the book lies not in its murder victims, its rising body count, ritualistic murders, torturous, gratutious sex, or overabundant profanity, but instead in the fact that you are faced with a man who you feel such sympathy for. Horrified as you may be by his actions, you can't deny the charisma of Bateman, nor can you deny Ellis' use of Bateman as a metaphor for the yuppie himself. Bateman, the metaphor, the yuppie, the hyperbole, and the satire, is our worst nightmare of a human being, yet it embodied a society that could not afford to lose him, that paid him $200,000 a year despite adultry, cocaine addiction, homophobia, and claims of murdering people. You sympathize with him because they tell him that he's not a bad person, when you know that he is. He is the hyperbole of the yuppie stereotype because he, like the yuppie norm, would go to any length to get the next rush, even at the length of murder.

It's also, oddly, a satire on American Values all in all. As said in the book by Bateman's CEO fiance, "Patrick's the Boy Next Door, aren't you Patrick?" "No I'm not, I'm a fucking evil psychopath and you know it." he mutters. He has the values that Ellis thinks, and that, upon close consideration, are the American values. He's a homophobe, a Republican, a businessman, an investor, engaged, he cooks, cleans. In truth he is the All American Boy except for the tiny fact that he butchers innocent people.

Throughout the streets of Manhattan (which, have you not been there, you may need a guidemap to survive), Ellis' Psycho takes you on a tour of a horrific American Elite, making you wonder who is truely the monster. He lives his own sick American Dream, which, in the chaos of his world, almost makes sense, and you grow to like him more and more... and then the graphic violence begins. Horriffied by it, you can't help but read, mystified, as the world passes you by. All of it drawing to the true crescendo, in which you are left, afriad, in the dust, wondering if it was all real or not.