On 'The Shards' by Bret Easton Ellis

The shocks come fast in Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in 13 years: The Shards is prefaced by a sweetly sincere – or is it? – thank you note from the notoriously misanthropic author “for your support over the past four decades… I’m more appreciative than you’ll ever know”. The story proper begins with the audacious ruse of “Bret Easton Ellis” looking metafictionally back across time at the defining events that befell him and his friends in the autumn of 1981, during their final year in high school.