The Book-a-Week Project, Week 7

Lunar Park
Bret Easton Ellis

Poking out from the rat-gnawed vaginas, raped children, and delusional psychotics of Bret Easton Ellis’s novels is a great sense of humor. All of his books are well-crafted, dark satire. As the main character of Lunar Park, Ellis turns the humor toward himself. His illustration of himself as (surprise!) a coke-snorting, vodka-sucking egomaniac with two young (and medicated) kids, a new wife who’s already tired of his bullshit, and a mistress (who also happens to be writing her masters thesis on him) is pathetic and hilarious. His jabs at the public’s perception of him are truly funny. One example: The novel he’s attempting to write in Lunar Park’s world is titled Teenage Pussy.

Lunar Park has some Stephen King in it, too. Ellis’s home houses demons besides self-loathing and addiction – the kind of demons with bloody claws and slime trails. The book depends heavily on the horror genre, and he pulls from it with skill.

Lunar Park is stylistically very different from anything Ellis has yet written, but he’s good at what he does and the book is tightly managed and engrossing.

Next up: The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Bobby Henderson. Good night.