Portrait of the Artist as a Young American Psycho

The conceit of Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel The Shards is that Ellis himself, as the narrator of the book, sees a former classmate on a street corner and is caught in a traumatic recollection of long-suppressed memories of a series of scary, violent incidents from his senior year of high school, in 1981. Los Angeles at that time, in Ellis’s recounting, is being terrorized by a serial killer known as “The Trawler.” The Trawler targeted teenagers with an elaborate and escalating game of stalking and harassment. He would enter their homes at will and rearrange furniture, leave rock posters in their mailboxes, call and hang up repeatedly, steal their pets, and finally kidnap the victim, who would be kept alive somewhere and tortured horribly. Then the Trawler would kill the victim, mutilate the corpse, decorate it with remnants of the victim’s pet, and finally stage it publicly, in a lavish Grand Guignol display.