Hadn’t you once wanted to “see the worst”? the writer asked me. Didn’t you once write that somewhere?
I might have. But I don’t want to anymore.
It’s too late, the writer said.
The internal monologue above provides only the slightest hint at just what a reality-blurring metafiction Bret Easton Ellis conjured up with his fifth novel Lunar Park, published in 2005. The book‘s protagonist is the author himself. Characters from his earlier works pop up regularly (including a certain Mr. Patrick Bateman - more on that in a minute); sometimes he is aware of their fictional nature, sometimes he is not. The opening chapter recaps the author’s life up until that point, blending exaggerated-reality with outright fiction so seamlessly that you get the idea the author was beginning to convince himself of the truth in his fabrications. The result is a thrilling, genuinely terrifying, and - most surprisingly to anyone familiar with Ellis’s work - tender concoction that defies conventions while purposefully straddling them. It sits snugly in a genre all of its own.
“Ellis” is a highly successful, though not very prolific, author who, it’s explained early on, has come out the other side of a drug- and booze-fuelled vortex with a wife and son, whose home he has recently begun inhabiting. His efforts to become a husband and father are not helped when his addictions begin to resurface, and it’s while he is indulging these on the sly during a party in his new house that he notices somebody there who is most definitely not on the guest list - it’s the aforementioned Bateman, and as his drinking and snorting activities increase in the days following he becomes convinced that the antihero of American Psycho, Ellis’s second novel, has unfinished business with him. He starts seeing visions of his dead, estranged father, and his paranoia really kicks into overdrive when his house starts transforming around him. Which would be bad enough except no-one seems to be noticing this phenomenon but him…
On the surface, Lunar Park comes the closest of all of Ellis’s fiction to straight horror. The author himself has stated that it is a homage to Stephen King; indeed, it bears more than a passing resemblance to King’s creation-come-to-life chiller The Dark Half. And it works impressively well on that level (particularly in the final act, when the trademark black comedy gives way entirely to old-fashioned, cinematic frights), and the book even includes three classic horror archetypes: The Haunted House, The Thing in the Woods, and - your favourite and mine! - The Possessed Toy.
But, as ever, Ellis is up to more than it at first appears. Underneath the horrors on show, there is a very clear sense of a man suffering through a number of crises: the mid-life variety, with Ellis obsessing over a 22 year old student who is doing her dissertation on him, and, foremost, a crisis of identity, symbolised through increasing amounts of differing - sometimes physical - manifestations of Ellis’s personality. Pure fiction, we must conclude. However the author is also preoccupied with his earlier work, in particular American Psycho, which is mentioned throughout. He appears particularly concerned with the book’s sickening violence: What drove him to indulge in such graphic imagery? And what are the ramifications, for himself as well as for the book’s readers? One wonders if this is where the real Bret Easton Ellis shows his face.
Ellis is known for drenching his work in satire and we find no exceptions here… except this time his primary target is himself. He is also known for the graphic violence just mentioned. But beneath the satire and the horror there is yet another layer: a wistful, tragic tale of a son trying not to turn into his father while simultaneously struggling to be any kind of father to his own son. The conclusion is guaranteed to choke up anybody who has ever lost either. Which may be the most startling aspect of a very startling novel.
Highly recommended for fans of Ellis, horror, or intelligent, razor-edged fiction of any stripe.
