Week 4 - American Psycho

I had been meaning to read this book for a while considering of the amount of controversy it had stirred up in its audience.  American psycho in my opinion is a novel that makes a strong statement about modern society. In summary, its thesis is that certain types of people are so obsessively set on outward perfection that they miss the real substance of being human. Money and beauty insulate these people from regular needs but create a high-power rivalry over status: the novel’s characters boast of paying more than they really did; they seek relationships for show rather than companionship.

Bateman spends his mornings at the gym and his nights clubbing with his friends. Everyone believes Bateman is a nice guy, the shy boy next door. What his friends didn’t know was that Bateman is a psychopathic killer who had confessed to his crimes repeatedly. No one wants to believe that the boy next door could hurt someone, so everyone chooses to ignore Bateman's confessions. This novel is both entertaining and frightening to me, it opens peoples eyes to the consequences of apathy in society. 

Reading American Psycho can be disturbing at times, but also the casualness with which Ellis presents the graphic scenes is as horrifying as it is genius. Although, Ellis’ style of writing kept me enthralled  and invested in a character who possesses no real emotion, no qualities with which I can relate to, which is quite genius to me because this is a hard quality to pull off.