‘Lunar Park’: Bret Easton Ellis’ meta-horror self-satire
In the space of just six years, author Bret Easton Ellis went from being the young literary darling of 1980s America to one of the most controversial, celebrated-yet-reviled figures in the late 20th-century Western cultural landscape. His early novels, Less than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, written in his distinctive affectless prose style, drew widespread acclaim. Still, his third, 1991’s American Psycho, saw criticism aimed at the author for pretty much the first time in his professional life.
It was the violent and misogynistic acts of the novel’s protagonist, Wall Street banker Patrick Bateman, that made Ellis something of a Pariah in the 1990s, although, by that time there, he’d already developed a reputation for debauchery and seemed to possess just as little care for what others thought of him as many of his depressed, desensitised characters. There’s always been a sense of mythology surrounding Ellis, so when he announced a memoir-style novel in the early 2000s, eyebrows across the literary world were raised in hopes that we could finally get closer to the real Ellis.
The opening sequence of Lunar Park is an account of Ellis’ early fame and excessive drug use, and it’s not until things get completely hyperbolic that we realise that the 2005 novel is more fictional than we might originally believe. What the text transpires to be is a kind of metatextual horror novel, with Ellis exploring what his life might have become if he were to have “settled down” in the suburbs with a famous actress following the supposed hedonism of his early years.
As the novel progresses, Bret (the fictional Ellis) is caught between the expectations of his domestic, suburban life and the rampancy of his former glory years. Yes, he takes his son Robby and step-daughter Sarah to the mall and the cinema when his wife Jayne asks him, but he does it with a killer hangover, despite him promising to be sober and in recovery following a disastrous, heroin-fuelled press tour of 1998’s Glamorama.
To make things worse, Bret seems to be haunted by a number of characters from his novels coming into his (real) life, including a young student resembling Clay from Less than Zero, Patrick Bateman and Donald Kimble from American Psycho and Mitchell Allen from The Rules of Attraction. Hell, even his deceased father, who was said to be the inspiration behind the violence of Bateman, also appears to be exerting some influence from beyond the grave.
So, there’s a clear interplay between fiction and reality in Lunar Park on many levels. Not only is there a fictional counterpoint to the real-life Ellis, but even that fictional Bret is also in the throes of battling against his own fictive creations. On the one hand, Ellis might be toying with the kind of press that seemed to constantly follow him around during the decade after American Psycho’s publication, painting a hyperbolic version of himself through which to point fun at the literary critics who previously assumed his behaviour to be entirely out of control.
On the other hand, Ellis is able to satirise white, suburban, middle-class America, as he often previously had, and imagine himself as a central, if reluctant, part of it. Allowing for further hands, Ellis is also keen to dive into the world of horror and had previously admitted that Lunar Park serves as a homage to the work of horror master Stephen King. One narrative facet surrounds a demented Furby (called Terby), which spelt backwards reveals “Y Bret” or “Why Bret”, a clear nod to King’s The Shining and its infamous “redrum” plot device.
Lunar Park is a very different novel from the kind that we’re used to with Ellis; it’s his first written in past tense and is certainly the most metatextual of his bibliography. There’s always been a sense of a mythological universe of Ellis’ creation – with characters from one novel popping up for just a moment in another – but Lunar Park was the moment in which Ellis threw himself into that very world, simultaneously mocking and celebrating his stature as a literary icon and enshrouding himself in yet another layer of open mystery.
