1. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Madman Patrick Bateman takes up narration duties as the chief protagonist in American Psycho. He tells us all about his dull yet slightly comical Yuppie lifestyle - comparing business cards, listening to bad 80s music, wining and dining all over New York with a group of guys who barely notice his existence. Patrick is a milquetoast Yuppie. He has a job in which he appears to do nothing, and he also has a Yuppie girlfriend called Evelyn, whom he clearly does not love. But aside from his Yuppie pursuits, Bateman is a sadistic murdering psychopath. He kills one of his co workers and gets away with it. He becomes bolder and bolder with his killings, making short work of two prostitutes in a grisly fashion. And he keeps getting away with murder. His apparent infallibility as a killer leads him to openly declare that he has murdered people to his Yuppie kin, but no one takes him seriously. He may be a joke but Patrick Bateman is obviously bonkers. There is considerable ambiguity in the narrative to suggest that Bateman might have imagined the whole book. Names and identities of generic Yuppies are constantly mixed up - and there is no doubt that Ellis wrote the book as a scathing satire of the Yuppie lifestyle, which he found himself inhabiting but which he thought was soulless and empty. Bateman is an Unreliable Narrator - we cannot believe 100% of what he says. In any case, he is barking mad because he is either a sick, sadistic killer or the book is a litany of the psychotic delusions of a deranged mind.