Ellis' house of mirrors

Author mines his own life to fuel entertaining, horror-confessional

Traver Kauffman, Special to the News

Published August 19, 2005 at midnight

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Bret Easton Ellis - author of Less than Zero, American Psycho and Glamorama, among other books - contains multitudes. Well, at least two. Even a quick dip into reviews of his previous books makes a case for him as the Jekyll and Hyde of American fiction - genius or fiend.

The average Joe probably remembers the now decade-and-a-half-old kafuffle over Ellis' American Psycho, which Simon & Schuster pulled about a month before its publication date because the novel contained passages in "questionable taste."

Soon released by Vintage, the book continued to draw charges of sadism, misogynism, nihilism and pornography. An irony-deficient Roger Rosenblatt, writing for The New York Times, pilloried American Psycho and condemned its author with the brief exhortation: "Snuff this book."

On the other hand, the cheeky Modern Review called Ellis "a profoundly moral writer." A Salon.com article dubbed him a "rogue genius worthy of canonization." And literati from Fay Weldon to Norman Mailer have stepped in to defend the "good" Bret Easton Ellis.

So who is this guy?

You may - or may not - find out by reading Ellis' new novel, in which his protagonist is, appropriately, one "Bret Easton Ellis," a drug-addled former literary Brat Packer who is in the midst of getting his flagging career on track by moving to the suburbs and planning a "pornographic thriller." Its crass title is certain to drive moral scolds to paroxysms of free publicity.

In Lunar Park, Ellis has appropriately constructed a metafictional fun house full of doubling, distorting mirrors. His setup sounds like the perfect grist for some of the author's unsparing satire, but something else is afoot here: Call it a satirical horror-confessional.

Lunar Park does indeed take an ironic view of the excesses of the 21st century, as you might expect, but it is, in the end, a book about the uneasy and often damaging relationships that bind fathers and sons. At the same time, it's built and sustained on the tropes of horror, with the author emptying out a dreadful bag of tricks until his namesake's mini-mansion is overstuffed with things that go bump in the night. The final shocker is that this mixed-up book not only works, but it is also creepy and compelling entertainment.

As the book begins, Ellis (the character) is trying to make a clean break with his wild ways and settle into a placid existence with his wife and two well-medicated children - only one of whom, Robby, is blood.

Alas, as the reader has been warned, our hero has demons, and these demons begin to take shape on Elsinore Lane. Lights flicker. A pillow is found torn to shreds, seemingly by a child's animatronic vulture doll. Furniture rearranges itself. Soon, and most horribly, a murderer strikes, and it's clear he's carefully reenacting the murders of Ellis' most notorious character, American Psycho's Patrick Bateman.

Further, many of the unexplained events point toward a haunting by the ghost of Ellis' father: The movie 1941 plays ceaselessly on television, even when it isn't scheduled. (Robert Ellis was born in 1941.) Bret keeps spotting a cream-colored Mercedes 450 SL around town, just like the one his old man used to drive. (The license-plate numbers on this car are "the exact same ones on the cream-colored 450 SL (his) deceased father had driven" 20 years before.)

And blank e-mails from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks, time-stamped at 2:40 a.m., keep arriving in Ellis' AOL inbox, even though the bank has no record of them being sent. (Robert Ellis died at 2:40 a.m., and his ashes are stored in a safety-deposit box in that same branch.)

This is all clearly implausible, of course, but the game-playing Ellis anticipates any objection in the first chapter: "Regardless of how horrible the events described here might seem, there's only one thing you must remember as you hold this book in your hands: all of it really happened, every word is true.

"The thing that haunted me the most? Since no one knew what was happening in our house, no one was scared for us."

Unconvincing? Perhaps. But to his credit Ellis faithfully cleaves to one of horror's essential conventions: For the bulk of the novel, no one believes that the haunting is anything other than the product of his mad, novelistic mind. And compounding the problem is the fact that he's always chock-full of some combination of cocaine, pot, Xanax, Klonopin and vodka.

So in a very literal, if also fantastic, sense, the things that brought him to fame - a lurid imagination and druggy excess - have now driven him to solitude and peril. This turn is characteristic of the grim humor of Lunar Park and satisfies as both a wise acknowledgment and oblique penance on the part of the author.

When this novel works, which is most of the time, it's because of Ellis' relentless details, which create a palpable sense of dread. True, he seems to be having fun toying with reader expectations - confusing the character with the author, for example - and there's detectable glee in the way he draws on the horror genre's hoariest tropes - The Thing in the Woods, The Possessed Doll, The Shadowy Figure Lurking Upstairs - but he dispatches them effectively and invests the novel with nice touches of his own invention.

Add in a subplot in which young local boys keep disappearing - the ones left behind seem eerily calm about it, and suspiciously keep e-mailing their missing friends - and there's no one in Lunar Park who is ever out of danger. Thus, tension builds admirably, and the pages keep turning.

Ultimately, amidst all the bloodshed, Ellis must confront the ghost of his father and the difficulty of madness and manhood. He's charged with not only reclaiming some of his ruined childhood - where, it seems, no one knew what was happening in his house, and no one was scared for him - but also protecting the childhood of his son Robby, who's in danger of suffering the same fate.

Does Ellis - the character or the author - fully succeed in this? Not quite. Aloof son Robby is never much of a presence; neither Ellis-as-author nor Ellis-as-character ever completely breaks through to him, even as a final meeting occasions some of the novel's most nakedly heartfelt prose.

Where's the real Ellis in all this? Readers will have to draw their own conclusions. What ultimately matters is that, in Lunar Park, the author provides fine entertainment while maneuvering his way through an exploration of patrimony that could have turned all-too-sentimental. In fact, despite all the happenings on Elsinore Lane that are beyond belief, the very real emotional undercurrent here comes frighteningly close to justifying the author's assertion that, in some sense, every word here is true.

And that's a trick even Ellis' detractors can't help but admire.

Traver Kauffman runs a literary weblog (rakesprogress.typepad.com). He lives in Denver.

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