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The Shards

The Novel Behind Disney+ Drama of Suspense, Seduction & Obsession, by the Author of American Psycho

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The Shards

By: Bret Easton Ellis
Narrated by: Bret Easton Ellis
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A sensational new novel from the bestselling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city. His first novel in 13 years, The Shards is Bret Easton Ellis at his inimitable best.

Los Angeles, 1981 –17-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 equalled 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 with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence.

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, Bret spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at 17 – sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.©2023 Bret Easton Ellis (P)2023 Random House Audio Coming of Age Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Suspense Thriller & Suspense Fiction Exciting Scary
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THE SHARDS
Bret Easton Ellis
(2021) pp594

LA, 1981 - affluent Westside canyons. Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” on the radio, “The Shining” just out in cinemas, Wayfarer sunglasses. Bret, the 17yo protagonist of this sprawling novel, “The Shards,” has been left alone at his parents’ house on Mulholland Drive for months at the start of his senior year. Bret is a budding writer. He is gay, and closeted.

At elite Buckley School, Bret runs with a popular crowd: Thom and Susan, the football star and his reluctant homecoming queen gf; and Bret’s gf, Debbie, the daughter of a wealthy film producer. In this surface world Bret presents himself as “the tangible participant,” - straight, fake, not paranoid. But in private, he is sleeping with two boys in his class and becoming increasingly obsessed with an LA serial killer the "Trawler"— gruesome abductions and murders of young women across the city.

Enter Robert Mallory, an impossibly handsome (and possibly evil) new student at Buckley, who threatens to disrupt Bret’s social circle. As Bret’s suspicion of Mallory grows — fueled by the young writer’s imagination and isolation, as well as the murder of a classmate (which may or may not be related to the Trawler) — his ability to play “the tangible participant” disintegrates.

The narration loops back on itself in a way that not only builds suspense, but also creates a visceral sensation of the slowness of time for a 17-year-old who feels trapped in a life that is not his own. And yet, the length and repetitions can be so taxing that the reader wonders if the book could have been shorter and still achieved the same psychedelic, collage-like effect. For all the narrative investment it demands, the novel’s climax and denouement ultimately failed for me.

Spoiler - who was the Trawler?
I have my own thoughts...
Was Bret and Robert one in the same?
Shards of a broken personality....

BEE is not for everyone. But i enjoyed.
3.5/5

BEE is nkt for all

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I loved this book. Took me back to the 80s with the descriptions of the clothes, films and music. Also some mysterious serial killer is a foot and there’s some seriously hot homoerotic action. Best book I’ve read since American Psycho.

Offbeat creepy page turner

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What a journey. I loved this book so much. So much detail. So engaging and so well narrated. 5 star book. Thank you to the author.

A masterpiece!

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I couldn’t stop listening to this audiobook. What a wonderful author, what an imagination. Love.

Fabulous

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Bret’s voice is enthralling. Really creepy and disturbing book but I enjoyed it. Geez, the Trawler needs to be found, I know it’s fiction but it’s too real.

WOW

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