4. Lunar Park (2005)
Lunar Park is a piece of metafiction - there are bits of it that are based on Ellis' life and the rest is fictional. There are real people in the novel such as Ellis' literary contemporary Jay McInerney. It is also the first novel of Ellis's to use the past tense. The book starts off by detailing Ellis' early career in a vivid but mainly faithful manner - with Ellis talking about his massive drug use and appalling tours to promote Glamorama. Then the book slips into fiction. Ellis describes meeting and marrying a fictional actress called Jayne Daniels with whom he has a child. They move to a place called Midland - a well to do town outside New York because after 9/11, they don't feel New York is safe any longer. There has also been a spate of terrorist bombings in supermarkets, and a dirty bomb detonated in Florida. Weird things start happening in the new Ellis household. His step daughter Sarah's toy - a Terby - seems to have acquired a life of its own and is terrorising Ellis. He thinks their house is haunted, but with his history of substance abuse - everyone thinks he is back on drugs, and this is behind his paranoia but weird things keep happening that he cannot rationalise. Bret Easton Ellis is in a playful mood writing Lunar Park. He is effectively writing an alternate version of his life in which he has embraced domesticity and given up bachelorhood to live in the suburbs. The book tends to sharply divide critics, but I have to say, it is one of the most entertaining and spooky books Ellis has written. I thoroughly enjoyed it as a portrait of encroaching madness and the scenes where the Terby is misbehaving. Ellis said that the book, was in part, a tribute to Stephen King - Terby spells Y Bret (why Bret?) backwards and is an homage to King's 'Redrum' in The Shining. The book is somewhat similar to The Shining with its paranormal overtones. The book also condemns the over-use of psychiatric drugs to needlessly control children in a birthday party scene where the medicated children are like soulless robots. But mainly, the book is a well written suspense tale. The mish-mashing of Ellis' real persona and his fictional persona makes for an intriguing read. Highly recommended.