California Dread

It’s the autumn of 1981, and Bret Easton Ellis is uneasy. Bret is the protagonist of The Shards, the author Bret Easton Ellis’ first novel in 13 years, a novel he first began narrating on his podcast. Ellis, though, is not here merely for mirror-games or another autofictive gambit. The Shards is larger than that, breezy yet hulking, a fictive memoir of a world Ellis knows inside and out. It is hard to write about The Shards and the success of this effort—Ellis’ best work, perhaps, outside of the era-defining American Psycho, and a leap forward from Lunar Park, another novel that featured a narrator named Bret Easton Ellis—without first regarding Southern California, the fallen utopia from which real and imagined Ellis sprung.