Lunar Park

The latest Ellis novel was one of his fastest page turners to date. I loved the memoir style, an obvious riff on the many "real" memoirs that have recently been exposed as fiction. Fiction bifurcates from the truth around page thirty or so, when Ellis cracks up from the drugs and alcohol and marries an ex-girlfriend with whom he shares a son (which he had kept a secret for years). He moves into her house in an attempt to clean himself up and establish some sort of family life and at the same time write a new novel. Strange things start to happen, including a toy bird that seems to come to life and a copycat killer who emulates the murders from Ellis' book American Psycho. The most interesting aspect of the book is that we don't know if Ellis is telling the absolute truth, if he is hallucinating and imagining things because of the drugs, or if he is blacking out and committing the acts himself. We really don't know for sure about any of it until (SPOILER ALERT!) the ash ghost comes down the stairs in front of the ghost hunter's crew (unless the fictional Ellis hallucinated the entire film crew and the incident with them in the house, which would be impossible because they tented and fumigated the house later). The end of the book produces as many if not more coincidences as a Charles Dickens novel, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief because the fictional Ellis is an unreliable narrator and his minor details can be called into question. A lot of people mention having questions about unresolved issues, but I only found one loose end, one thing I wanted to know that was never revealed. What was the word his son wrote on the picture that was also written in his father's ashes in the bank box? Maybe I missed it, or maybe it wasn't there. I would recommend being familiar with Ellis' previous works before you read this (I've read all of his books several times), but I know people who have read this one first, enjoyed it, and moved on to American Psycho to fill in the gaps. I thought it interesting that he didn't mention the Rules of Attraction movie, even though he did talk about the other ones. I also liked the inclusion of Jay McInerney (writer of Bright Lights, Big City and Ellis' literary counterpart who I like okay but who is nowhere near as good as Ellis) as a character. It actually prompted me to pick up McInerney's new book, The Good Life. Overall, Lunar Park was a brilliant addition to the Ellis collection and well worth the wait.

It was hard for me to know how to read this book. I had read all of his previous work, but did not remember much except that none of his books could ever come close to the power of AMERICAN PSYCHO. (And regardless of your feeling about the book, you can't argue it wasn't powerful.) I was therefore convinced that Ellis had peaked and that everything else he wrote would be points marking his descent. Convinced that LP would be derivative, weak, or worst of all, a shock-filled imitation of AP, as I sometimes felt with his previous novel, GLAMORAMA. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ellis can write! Instead of finding a stylish copy of previous works, I found that LP is mature in its handling of each moment. More mature than any of Ellis' previous works. Instead of characters moving listlessly from one profound (yet unexplored) situation to the next, as in previous work, these characters interact with each other and learn and grow and react! I know this sounds very clinical, but that was sometimes how his previous characters felt to me, even the fully realized ones. These characters do their best to respond to an increasingly surreal environment. An environment which closes in on them even as they are trying to control it. The result of which is the most easily accessible plot in his catalogue, deftly told and even an intelligent mystery in it's own way.

Where does sanity begin and end? Can moving to the suburbs bring you sanity, or lure you into insanity? In Bret Easton Ellis's brilliant new novel, LUNAR PARK --- his first in six years --- these ideas surface through the life of a character who surprisingly has the same name as the author. Is Ellis trying to tell the reader that this story is autobiographical, or is it some elaborate coincidence? Ellis's previous novels are disturbing, but they usually escape being categorized as horror. LUNAR PARK, despite its classification as literature, absolutely earns itself a place among the top works of horror. Interestingly, this is Ellis's least graphic and gruesome work. The highly symbolic gore and explicit sex that fills his other novels is sparse here. Its place is filled with intricate descriptions of the daily activities of a suburban family and the aesthetics of Ellis's home --- activities and settings that for most families would seem monotonous. The horror gradually builds throughout LUNAR PARK and takes place over twelve days. Bret Easton Ellis, a young and highly successful writer and author of five novels --- several of which brought him not only fame at a young age but also incredibly harsh criticism for insidious violence and sex --- has reconnected with old girlfriend/superstar/actress Jayne Dennis, the mother of his only son. Dennis also has a daughter, but from another relationship. Ellis joins the family and their mysteriously intuitive dog in a paradigmatic Suburbia where he hopes to leave drugs behind and focus on a new novel that has a purposefully lascivious and tawdry name. He also will perfunctorily teach one class at a nearby liberal arts college that highly resembles his alma mater. But Ellis's plans for peace are hindered by a reoccurring figure from his past. In addition, it seems that an obsessed fan and student at the college where Ellis now teaches is carrying out the murders from AMERICAN PSYCHO in nearby towns and trying to contact Bret and ruin his life. There is a supernatural element in this novel --- unique to Ellis's work --- that climaxes in the last seventy pages and leaves the reader completely transfixed and hooked. Glimpses of unnatural activity such as strange lights, ambiguous figures, peeling paint, vanishing children and sinister dolls continuously appear throughout the book, and all relate to that recalcitrant figure from the past. Further, Ellis, in a schizophrenic manner, develops a subconscious voice that makes itself very clear and calls itself The Writer. The reader follows Ellis through his dwindling cognizance and watches him teeter on a very thin line, not knowing which way he will turn, or fall. Ellis may regain a normal life and be a father to his son, forgetting about the innumerable missing boys that show up in the daily paper, or he may crumble into drugs, alcohol, money and delusion, never to be seen again. It all depends on a reconciliation with his past. LUNAR PARK, and especially its

This really surprised me. Despite what some of the major reviews have implied, this book has very little of the sort of druggy debauchery, and none of the sex, that Ellis' earlier books are known for, despite a plot which forces us to travel back through those same books. What it does have - and have in spades - is a sense of underlying dread that, while present in much of his previous writing, has never been brought to life quite this well. It's horror, but a dreamy horror, more like Lovecraft or Poe than Thomas Harris. Another reviewer here likened `Lunar Park' to Stephen King, and while that reviewer meant it as an insult (I think) it's not a bad comparison. This is a book filled with ghouls and hallucinations, but also real-world horrors: alcoholism, self-hatred, and `antagonism', which, as we learn from a well-drawn exorcist towards the end of the novel, can literally turn a man to ash. There is also the horror of children. In `Lunar Park' we are both afraid FOR them, and afraid OF them - one minute they're having nightmares and need protecting, the next minute they're keeping secrets from us and possibly faking their own abductions. The parents in the book all medicate their kids mercilessly, which only serves to underscore the separation between parents and children, between our lives as we would like to see them, and our lives as they really are. And then there's the writing. It's wonderful. There's a passage on p.55 - "The newspapers kept stroking my fear. New surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything..." - that offers one of the better descriptions of the post-9/11 mindset I've come across. And the last few pages, in which Ellis makes a shaky truce with the ghost of his father, are heartbreaking (my eyes filled up - I'm not kidding). The only weak scene in the book is the Halloween party that kicks off the whole story - the dialogue between Ellis and Jay McInerney (who makes a cameo appearance) seems so empty that one wonders why Ellis bothered writing it down (then again, maybe he was making a point about those brat-pack days of yore). But this is nitpicking - on the whole Ellis is terrific here. **On a side note, one book that `Lunar Park' seems to echo, and not just in its title, is John Cheever's classic "Bullet Park." Cheever's book was another story of suburban horror, drenched in alcohol and general despair, with an ending that Ellis could only admire: a guy uses a chainsaw to cut through the doors of a church to save his son from being burned to death by a cold-blooded sadist. Ellis' book does for our generation what Cheever's did for his, and they make great tandem reading (I went back and reread Cheever right after `Lunar Park.')