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.

I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf for at least two years and kept putting it off purely because of how massive it is. I love the idea of tackling a long book, but every time I pick one up my mind tends to start wandering toward what I want to read next after a while. Still, I wanted to check out the TV series that just came out, and I always prefer reading the source material first. I ended up doing a tandem read on this one, which honestly made a huge difference in keeping me locked in.

The book is told from the POV of seventeen year old Bret who is finishing up his senior year at an exclusive LA prep school when a new student named Robert Mallory shows up. Mallory quickly works his way into Bret’s tight circle of friends, and Bret becomes increasingly fixated on him, a fixation that starts to tangle with his growing obsession over a serial killer on the loose known as the Trawler, whose crimes seem to be creeping closer and closer to Bret’s own life. The connections start to feel too specific to be coincidence, but everything is filtered through the mind of a teenager who’s already got a gift for shaping the events of his own life into narrative. As the lines between Robert and the Trawler start to blur in Bret’s head, he spirals further into paranoia and isolation, and the story builds toward a collision between the two threats that could only end in bloodshed.

I love a good story about rich people behaving badly, and this book delivers plenty of that wrapped in a distinctly eighties package. It’s kind of like taking the spoiled kids from Gossip Girl, dropping them into 1980s LA, making one of them gay and a few others gay curious, and then tossing an actual serial killer into the mix. Once I settled into the rhythm of it, I really enjoyed the ride.

This is very much literary fiction at its core, and the serial killer element works almost entirely through presence rather than action. He’s constantly haunting the story and haunting Bret specifically, more of a looming shadow than an active threat on the page, and that restraint actually fits the tone of the book perfectly. The dread comes from what might be happening just as much as anything that actually does.

What really struck me was how Ellis structured this one. He writes himself in as the main character, and the line between what’s fiction and what might actually be real blurs so effectively that I’ll admit it, I actually googled afterward to see if any of this really happened. That’s how convincing the whole thing felt while I was reading it.

Pacing wise, this is a slow, immersive kind of read. Once you fall into its rhythm, and get inside the main character’s head, it’s easy to forget how long it is. If you’re into darker literary fiction that blurs the line between memoir and thriller, this one is absolutely worth it.