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The Shards

A Novel

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The Shards

Written by: Bret Easton Ellis
Narrated by: Bret Easton Ellis
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About this listen

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A novel of sensational literary and psychological suspense from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged high school friends in a vibrantly fictionalized 1980s Los Angeles as a serial killer strikes across the city

“A thrilling page turner from Ellis, who revisits the world that made him a literary star with a stylish scary new story that doesn't disappoint.” –Town & Country

Bret Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A., The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at seventeen—sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.

©2023 Bret Easton Ellis (P)2023 Random House Audio
Coming of Age Horror Psychological Scary Fiction
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What the critics say

“Ellis is a true literary craftsman, and the novel’s imagery is lush and gorgeous . . . there is an exciting new vulnerability in Ellis’s latest book, inviting the reader more profoundly into the emotional realm of the protagonist than he has with his previous characters.” —The New York Times Book Review

“It’s been a dozen years since Bret Easton Ellis published a novel. And his latest, The Shards . . . is worth the wait. Hermetic, paranoid, sleek, dark—and with brief explosions of the sex and violence that have characterized Ellis’ oeuvre—The Shards is a stark reminder that the American Psycho author is a genre unto himself.” —NPR

“Cleverly done . . . eerie . . . The Shards establishes a tricky two-step of sincerity and unreliability.”The Wall Street Journal

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Bravo

A brilliant book and the author’s delivery is pitch perfect! You won’t be disappointed if you’re a fan of Ellis’ work.

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Great Story...but

I enjoyed this story. Ellis is a great writer and narrator. FAR too much graphic gay sex, but the mystery was good. I'll check out American Psycho soon.

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Absorbing and eerie and totally fascinating…

I’ve always been a fan of Bret Easton Ellis and when I heard he was releasing another novel. after more than a decade, I was excited. As soon as I started this book, I was totally absorbed. Characters are quintessentially Ellis; spoiled, self obsessed, and high on drugs. I didn’t experience LA in the early 1980s, but I felt like I was totally there while I was reading this book. This book is filled with dread that creeps up very slowly and stealthily, and gets under the skin. I loved the mystery, the drama, the comedy, the horror. This book has it all. I can’t wait to see what he does next. Let’s just hope it’s not another 11 years before it happens.

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Unsatisfying

It meanders for far too long. The same endless, pointless, conversations are had time and time again ‘what do you mean x?!’.
I ended up playing a drinking game every time Bret ‘realized’ something or did someone ‘immediately’. As a result I spent most of the book more wasted than Bret after all those ludes…

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