Bret Easton Ellis Has All the Answers

Ready or not, here he comes. In The Shards, his first novel in 13 years, the great American bomb thrower, Bret Easton Ellis, plunges us back into the world of Wayfarers and BMWs in early-’80s Los Angeles, where a character named “Bret” attends an elite prep school and a deranged serial killer is on the loose. (The book is appropriately dedicated, “To no one.”) In the opening lines of The Shards, the narrator equates a novel to a “dangerous game,” and surely Ellis has been playing dangerously with readers ever since he released his first glamorous nightmare masterpiece Less Than Zero in 1985, at age 21.