Lunar Park

Imagine becoming a best-selling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs.

Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety - only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father's, his stepdaughter's doll violently "malfunctions," and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events - a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son's age... Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania.

Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution - about love and loss, fathers and sons - in what is surely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career.

The novel begins with an inflated and parodistic but reasonably accurate portrayal of Ellis' early fame. It details incidents (probably exaggerated) of his wild drug use and his publicly-humiliating book tours. The novel dissolves into fiction as Ellis describes his liaison with an actress named Jayne Dennis, whom he later marries, and with whom he conceives an (initially) illegitimate child. From this point the fictional Ellis' life reflects the real Ellis' only in some descriptions of the past and possibly in his general sentiments. As the novel progresses, the haunting of Ellis' McMansion and questions over the death of his father become increasingly prominent. With his history of drug use and alcoholism, his wife, children, and housekeeper are understandably skeptical of his claims that the house is haunted.

By the looks of it Jayne Dennis is a fictional character created by Ellis as his wife in this novel. Although she does have a website, it consists of bad photoshops and a fictional filmography. Ellis links to her site from his, but it is suspected he created Dennis' site himself. There is no profile for an actress of this name on either www.imdb.com or eonline.com. It is noted in a disclaimer on the stills page that the site is a work of fiction.

He was born in Los Angeles and raised in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, the son of Robert Martin Ellis, a wealthy property developer, and Dale Ellis, a housewife. His parents divorced in 1982. He was educated at The Buckley School, where he did not distinguish himself, and then took a music-based course at Bennington College in Vermont, which is thinly disguised as Camden Arts College in his novel The Rules Of Attraction and his other books. He was a part-time musician in some minor 1980s bands, such as The Parents, before his first book was published while he was still a student. Less Than Zero, a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles, was well received by the critics and sold respectably (50,000 copies in its first year). He moved to New York in 1987 to release his second novel.

His most controversial work, the graphically violent novel American Psycho, was intended to be published by Simon & Schuster but they withdrew after external protests (NOW, and many others, considered the novel dangerously misogynistic and worse) and pressure from Gulf & Western. The novel was later published by Vintage. Some consider this novel, whose protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is both a cartoonishly materialistic yuppie and a serial killer, to be an example of transgressive art. American Psycho has achieved considerable cult status.

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- Less Than Zero (1985)
A raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation.

- The Rules Of Attraction (1987)
A startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the future--or even the present--who become entangled in a curious romantic triangle.

- American Psycho (1998)
Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

- The Informers (1994)
A chilling, fascinating, and outrageous descent into the abyss beneath L.A.'s gorgeous surfaces.

- Glamorama (1998)
In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed culture and increases the volume exponentially.