The Shards

I... really liked this?

A sort of inverted HOUSE OF MIRTH about being a closeted teen in LA in 1981, with the horrors and paranoia and secrets of the teenage years placed in a fun house mirror by the looming violence of a serial killer, which serves as both a narrative obsession and as an abstract force of nature that no teen could possibly understand.

The book started a little slow for me, but I found my way into it, as that start established the rhythm of the story, which I started to enjoy, and I was absolutely pulled in during the middle third, and by the final third, I could not put it down. As an admirer of David Fincher's film ZODIAC, I appreciate the book's ambiguities very much and was sort of driven pleasurably crazy by how the book's use of narration gave adult author “Bret” the chance to examine things and parse out the story while teen “Bret” and his friends were all deeply inarticulate and unable to say what they meant in almost every circumstance.

So, this worked for me– Teen “Bret”'s paranoia and naive moral code coupled with a complete lack of self-awareness felt INCREDIBLY accurate to me, and while there were a couple of moments that I found Ellis to be making a point that felt “off”, especially the moments when adult “Bret”remembers his teenage self through Ellis' own contemporary political lens (being sexually manipulated under the guise of a screenplay meeting and then shrugging it off, his off-hand comment about being lectured about antisemitism in CHARIOTS OF FIRE– both moments felt outside the character of the fictional “Brets”), the vast majority of the book does an incredible job of using this fractured relationship between Ellis and his “Brets” as a propulsive force to keep the reader engaged. I also felt for teen Bret, whose struggle between his true self as a gay kid and the fictional self he was constructing for his peers was a key emotional component in making the stakes of the book feel actually, tangibly (see what I did there?) tragic.

As I see it, the titular “Shards” of the book are these fractured layers of the “Brets” and Ellis, and this beautifully choreographed dance between fiction and autofiction had a huge impact on the book as a “horror” or “crime” story for me– the narrative back and forth, with adult “Bret” laying out clues in the form of a first person recollection and teen “Bret” too horny and closeted and drugged up and at war with who he really was to f***ing remember to act on the clues or put the pieces together and the actual author Ellis playing with this dynamic to drive me forward as a reader– this all contributed to the sense of dread which ended up REALLY working for me in a pleasurable way. Ellis can truly deliver the creeps, and the propulsive energy of the book's escalating paranoia and violence in the final third was thrilling– I ended up picking the book up each day like I was a voyeur, I wanted to see what was next and I just could not stop reading.

I am sure your mileage will vary, but I have to say, I'm off to watch Icehouse and Ultravox videos on YouTube and let my Gen X brain enjoy the afterglow of a super fun read...