This was my first time reading the book in its entirety and its original English - which was great to finally have done - but I have been so familiar with this story for many, many years now, both because I had read parts of a Norwegian translation, I've seen the movie adaptation, plus I've often heard people talk about it. Still, none of that took anything away from getting to experience the full novel first-hand, the impact of it was still as strong!

American Psycho is a very fascinating, quirky story. I can imagine some people reading it very literally and just thinking that the main character, Patrick Bateman, is a true sicko who does some gnarly stuff. Which, fair, they're right as far as that goes. But there are many more layers underneath all of that.

The premise is very satirical, making far-from-subtle comments on the 1980s Wall Street yuppies, and their obsession with greed, materialism, power, social status, appearance, and shameless indulgence in fancy food, drinks, and cocaine, with ol' Trump as their god and mentor (...not much have changed in that respect these days, has it?)

Just the way they keep mistaking each other for other people feels like a commentary both on how shallow and unoriginal they all are, all of them so uniform in their yuppie look that nobody can tell each other apart anymore. Shallow, narcissistic people, and Bateman is almost like the ultimate personification of it all, because he always goes the extra mile with all of it.

The real bummer here, though, is that Bateman missed his true calling as a music reviewer! But seriously, though, the way he literally talks about artists for entire chapters feels like a way to showcase his OCD tendencies, which we also see by the way he constantly talks in detail about clothes and brands and jewelry and items in rooms and their prices. (Since I enjoy writing, I'm glad I didn't read this book at a young enough age for me to miss the satirical points, thus ending up misconstruing this as the correct way to describe scenarios in books!)

So much time is spent on establishing these traits - pretty much the first third of the book - that you are almost starting to get bored with it (repeat, almost), when the first real act of violence occurs, which will definitely wake you back up again. With this sequence set up as a contrast to everything that came before in the book, I feel that it's a clever way to emphasize how shocking and disturbing Bateman's behavior truly is once his darker side reveals itself.

Now, those parts in the book are definitely a difficult read. The violence is very graphic, and accompanying that are overtly sexual descriptions which eventually start to blend together with the violence, making Bateman both a sexual predator and a lethal one. Bateman will take you through these scenarios with just as much of an OCD way of describing things to the last detail just like he's describing clothes or talks about music, with the same routine-based way of wording it all as well, which just shows you how emotionally detached and sociopathic he truly is.

One of the elements that very noticeably separate the movie from the book the most, is the sense of ambiguity. There is some of that in the book too, but I feel like the movie adaptation left some things much more open-ended, while the book seems to much more strongly indicate that several events did in fact take place, even if he's somewhat confused, full of anxiety and borderline delusional during some moments, making you just unsure enough of whether certain things are really happening or if he's having some sort of psychotic break. The momentary change from first-person narration to third-person is a brilliant way to illustrate this break from reality.

But whether some things truly happened or they were just a part of his own delusions, it either way shows you that he is indeed a psycho with a very sick mind. And as if to come full circle, the entire yuppie community's shallowness and self-absorbed nature is pointed out further when Bateman starts to directly tell people straight up what violent dreams he's having, and they either don't pay attention, interpret it as dark humor, or simply ignore it altogether.

It's a very well-written book, a good story with excellent satire, while at the same time, it's stomach-churningly disturbing in many ways on several occasions.

Now, as this review is concluded, I have to go return some video tapes...!