The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis was my favorite book I read last year. Drugged out rich kids in private school, lots of music mentions (to the point there’s playlists of it) and a 70s styled California serial killer. I was very into it.
What Ellis did to the Young Professional in American Psycho, he does to the American teenager in The Shards - violently and carnally probes archetypes put on pedestals by American society, swapping New York traders and socialites for quarterbacks and prom queens. Sweeps you up with lives you wished you lived all the while making you grateful you don't. Not without true humanity and flashes of resemblance to figures and events in my own years of high school debauchery.
LA getting you down? because its Too Boring? Escape into this provocative - bordering-smut novel
that takes place in more exciting, drug fueled times. It’s called ’The Shards’ and I read it earlier this summer and could not put it down. Like most of Ellis’ writing, it’s got well dressed preppy hot people and cocaine and serial killers. After reading ’The Shards’, I’ve been very visually inspired by 1980s LA 🎥🎥🎥
By all means defining and also a perfectly strange starter for his work, THE SHARDS is a quasi-prequel to LESS THAN ZERO, and while it may take place in the 80s, feels like a perfect, ambivalent exploration of violence in our time.
To show her I was using this magnifier headset thing she gave me at Christmas. I was doing some hobby watchmaking. Since I wear glasses its hard to do a traditional loupe.
