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The Shards

By: Bret Easton Ellis
Narrated by: Bret Easton Ellis
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Publisher's Summary

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

What listeners say about The Shards

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Offbeat creepy page turner

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.

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    4 out of 5 stars
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BEE is nkt for all

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


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Bret(t) at his best

Bret’s writing carries you in a numb, drug like dream into a nightmare so seamlessly that it shocks you when you realize where the story is at. He turns nostalgia into horror in a way no one else can. I binged it, couldn’t put it down.

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Riveting evocation of an era

I’d admired Bret Easton Ellis’s writing for some time - the books of his I’d read, I greatly enjoyed - and so I was delighted to find him narrating his own work on Audible. This audiobook of “The Shards” lived up to expectations in every way - Mr Ellis’s delivery is perfect for the narrative and having him narrate a story which is (ostensibly) personal to him, in spirit if not in factual content, was very rewarding. The story itself is, by turns, tragic, repulsive, nostalgic and suffused with the end-of-empire ennui of 1980’s America.

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Expectedly Compelling

I first was uncomfortable with the idea of auto-fiction, the mix of autobiography and fiction, but this may have changed my stance yet. At points in this book I found what felt like meandering stories trivial, but continuing on I saw how it built up around the narrative both the audience is reading and the author is telling to himself, as the (fictional) 17 year old self he is in the book, of which he is writing about a (again, fictional) time in his life which he is encountering the maddening existence of a serial killer in their midst, while life goes on as if there is no looming threat. The storytelling of the narrator as first-person present tense leads the reader to think and puzzle over clues, hints, assumptions, motivations, and ideas, making this a page-turner (or whatever the audio-version of that idiom is) right to the conclusion.

If it seems a bit hard to get into, persevere, the overall book and ending is worth it.

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Fabulous

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

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WOW

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.

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Absolutely superb. I really enjoyed this book.

Such a strange selection of themes, particularly the main character’s psychological dissociation as he navigated his perception of threat.

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Epic entertainment

This is classic Easton Ellis. Descriptive, gripping, sexy,frightening. His voice is hypnotic and the story line is one of his best.

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Amazing writer

Shocking and brilliant. A writer who keeps you guessing and confronts life in a way most normal people can’t conceive

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