American Psycho

American Psycho is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. It takes the form of a first-person monologue by Patrick Bateman, a wealthy, vain investment banker in Manhattan who, during the Wall Street boom of the late 1980s, leads a double life as a serial killer. Written in the present tense and in a stream-of-consciousness style, the book reflects its narrator's obsessions, compulsions and existential emptiness, and some passages can read as incoherent, a quality the novel presents as an expression of Bateman's mental disintegration.

The story follows Bateman's routine: Friday nights in nightclubs with colleagues, where they snort cocaine, criticise each other's clothes and swap fashion advice; his loveless engagement to a fellow yuppie, Evelyn; and his strained relationship with his brother and his senile mother. Bateman gives detailed accounts of his daily grooming regimen while his violence escalates. After killing a colleague, Paul Owen, he takes over Paul's apartment as a place to lure and kill more victims. His crimes grow from simple stabbings to lengthy sequences of torture, mutilation, cannibalism and necrophilia, while his hold on reality weakens. His confessions to coworkers are never taken seriously; listeners ignore them or misunderstand them. The novel reaches its climax in a street shooting spree that brings in a SWAT team, after which Bateman enters a phase of hallucinations and doubt about what he has actually done.

Ambiguity runs throughout the text: characters mistake one another, adopt other people's identities, and the reader cannot be sure what is real. The ending, in a bar where the men agree that economic success equals happiness, closes the book with the same boredom with which it began.

The novel provoked considerable controversy over its explicit violence and was banned or withdrawn in several countries before becoming a cult work and a subject of academic study. It was adapted into a film in 2000 starring Christian Bale, which was generally well received, and later into a musical that premiered in London in 2013 and then transferred to Broadway.

Beyond the scandal, many critics read it as a satire of 1980s consumerism and the culture of appearances, in which people become commodities. Bateman treats others as interchangeable objects, and his violence appears as the extreme expression of that logic. The book thus explores objectification, superficiality and the emptiness of a society obsessed with money and image.