The Shards: A Novel
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.
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