A review by therivingtonreader
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

1.0

Well, I did not enjoy this book very much. Had I not listened to the last half of the audiobook instead of reading, I probably wouldn't have finished it. It was very repetitive, gross, and altogether just not very good. I went in expecting to love it because I love horror, especially psychological, and I also enjoy satire. But I didn't really find this to be that satirical apart from the very beginning. It got old really fast. There was so much of this book that could have been cut out and nothing would have been lost from the story. You could probably read the last 50 pages and get the gist of what the entire book is about. There's pages of Patrick talking about fancy restaurants, debating with his coworkers about where to make reservations, listing off every designer brand of every item of clothing for every character he interacts with (not even an exaggeration), all the fancy food they were eating, and excessively descriptive sex scenes. I don't consider myself a prude, but these seemed intentionally gross and they went on for way too long. Maybe 20% of this book was actually him being violent or murdering people, including 3 dogs. There were also at least 3 chapters about different music artists where he just talked about their albums and what he liked - which by the last one I had just skipped it because it didn't add anything to the story. I also skipped a several page chapter where Patrick spent an hour on the phone debating with his coworkers where to eat. And, the word "hardbody" is used probably 100 times over the 400 pages in this story which really annoyed me?? Find a new word lol. I was really just not impressed