The Shards: A novel (Unabridged)
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A novel of sensational literary and psychological suspense from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged high school friends in a vibrantly fictionalized 1980s Los Angeles as a serial killer strikes across the city
“A thrilling page turner from Ellis, who revisits the world that made him a literary star with a stylish scary new story that doesn't disappoint.” –Town & Country
Bret Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.
Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.
Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A., The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at seventeen—sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
Customer Reviews
BEE at his best.
I think this is BEE’s best work since American Psycho. You may disagree, that is your choice..
Genius!
There’s a quote about the greatest writers teaching how to read their books.
I now know how amazing that feels.
I’ve read a couple of his books and really loved but didn’t quite get them sometimes
The shards is this long pleasant, scary, sexy, terror and doomed ride to stop Robert Mallory ( the new kid in town, eagles ) systematically killing Brett’s cirlcle of friends.
Stay on the ride and be rewarded with how brilliant Ellis truly is
It takes genius to pull something like this off and he killed it!
There’s no love in the icehouse, nor Vienna
I JUST CANT GET ENOUGH.
His best performance
Audio book review
Maturity has improved Ellis already excellent style and perspective. Interesting, entertaining and my new favorite from the author. At the halfway point it hasn’t left me breathless but, then I guess that is the point.