First American paperback edition (1991)Cover in excellent condition.Very tight, square, seemingly unread copy. No spine creasing, cover in excellent uncreased condition. Some internal foxing on pages.
Bret Easton Ellis's dark satire on eighties excess and horror.
Set in Manhattan during the Wall Street boom of the late 1980s, American Psycho follows the life of wealthy young investment bankerPatrick Bateman. Bateman, in his mid-20s when the story begins, narrates his everyday activities, from his recreational life among the Wall Street elite of New York to his forays into murder by night.
Bateman was crazy the same way I was. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. That is where the tension of American Psycho came from. It wasn't that I was going to make up this serial killer on Wall Street. High concept. Fantastic. It came from a much more personal place, and that's something that I've only been admitting in the last year or so. I was so on the defensive because of the reaction to that book that I wasn't able to talk about it on that level.[6]
— Bret Easton Ellis
First American paperback edition (1991)Cover in excellent condition.Very tight, square, seemingly unread copy. No spine creasing, cover in excellent uncreased condition. Some internal foxing on pages.
Bret Easton Ellis's dark satire on eighties excess and horror.
Set in Manhattan during the Wall Street boom of the late 1980s, American Psycho follows the life of wealthy young investment bankerPatrick Bateman. Bateman, in his mid-20s when the story begins, narrates his everyday activities, from his recreational life among the Wall Street elite of New York to his forays into murder by night.
Bateman was crazy the same way I was. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. That is where the tension of American Psycho came from. It wasn't that I was going to make up this serial killer on Wall Street. High concept. Fantastic. It came from a much more personal place, and that's something that I've only been admitting in the last year or so. I was so on the defensive because of the reaction to that book that I wasn't able to talk about it on that level.[6]
— Bret Easton Ellis