The gratuitous violence, smugness and matter-fact narration are par for the course with Ellis, a writer who has the ability to turn the mundane into gold. All the while, Bret has to tread carefully - this is the eighties and he risks outing himself as gay, which would mean losing his friends and social status.
#SHARDS OF WAR MAKERS MOVIE#
Debbie’s father, a movie producer, attempts to seduce Bret after inviting him to pitch his idea for a screenplay.īret becomes increasingly obsessed with Robert and reveals his concerns to the school’s headmaster, who is troubled by his seemingly fanciful accusations about a fellow student. Susan runs off for a weekend with Robert. Things start to unravel at a pace as adolescence comes to an end.
#SHARDS OF WAR MAKERS SERIES#
When a series of Bret’s friends begin receiving the killer’s calling card - posters of rock bands and silent phone calls along with pets that go missing - he begins investigating.
#SHARDS OF WAR MAKERS SERIAL#
Meanwhile, the papers are full of stories about a horrific serial killer called the Trawler. Bret decides he’s a liar and when Matt, one of the boys from school that Bret meets for afternoon sex, is gruesomely murdered in what appears to be a ritual killing, Bret’s suspicions about Robert intensify. Bret can’t stop thinking about Robert and how he spotted him in a movie theatre earlier that year when he went to see The Shining, even though Robert denies it was him. The newcomer is gorgeous, and everyone is taken with him. When Robert Mallory arrives, everything changes. Where the novel triumphs, is in Ellis’s depiction of these entitled teenagers - far from vapid, they are nuanced and complex individuals who actually care about each other. But Bret has a dark secret - he likes having athletic sex with boys. He has a girlfriend named Debbie and his two best friends Thom and Susan are about to be voted homecoming king and queen. At first, he refers to this period as “paradisiacal”, in sharp contrast to the horror that lies ahead. His parents mostly absent - physically and emotionally - he lives alone with Shingy the dog and a Latina housekeeper named Rosa who leaves spaghetti in the fridge for him. Young Bret, a pop culture maven who consumes music and movies, lives in a Mulholland Drive mansion that overlooks the San Fernando Valley. Early we learn that Bret will go on to write such novels as Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Glamorama. The writing is usually clear, simple, factual, and descriptive.” Autofiction, on the other hand, takes the reader inside what happened, blurring the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. As French novelist Catherine Cusset wrote in a 2012 essay, “A memoir tells the reader what happened. Narrated with hindsight, it blends meta- and auto fiction - in Ellis’s game with the reader, he is the narrator, writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel supposedly based on true events.īut it’s not memoir. At an audacious 600 pages, it takes place in the autumn of the last year of high school. Bulky novels usually span multiple generations, decades, and centuries, but not this one. The Shards, his first novel in 13 years, began life as a serialised story read at the start of each new episode of Ellis’s popular podcast. In 2005, Ellis published Lunar Park, a metafictional novel that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, and in which Ellis himself is a character.
His subsequent works include The Informers (1994), a collection of short stories set in Los Angeles, and Glamorama (1998), a ridiculously cool satire of the fashion industry that features models, celebrities, and terrorists.
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