Lunar Park [ペーパーバック]

"Lunar Park" is probably Ellis' best, most readable novel since "Less Than Zero." The influences you can spot are many. The writer using his own public persona as the protagonist surely comes from Philip Roth, most notably his classic "Operation Shylock." Ellis provides some pungent satire on contemporary suburbia, so the title probably hearkens back to John Cheever's Bullet Park. (The revelation after his death of Cheever's ambiguous sexuality no doubt also interested Ellis.) But the main thing Ellis does is offer up an homage to Stephen King (Ellis' fictional wife even calls him "Jack Torrance" at one point, who of course is the protagonist of "The Shining", a book to which this novel owes a whole lot.)

The first chapter of "Lunar Park" may be the most clever thing Ellis has ever written. It's an autobiography that agrees with every bad review, every unflattering press article ever written about the guy. He says he wrote all his books under the influence of drugs, quickly and for the money; he's a monster of sexual promiscuity and excess who incidentally sired a son out of wedlock more than 10 years before. He recounts his tortured relationship with his late father (to whom "Lunar Park" is dedicated). You get the feeling here that Ellis is burning down the edifice of his public career, burning all the bridges to his past. It's hilarious and horriying, and must have taken a lot of courage to write.

The first half of "Lunar Park" is mesmerizing (I managed to finish the book in one night.) He paints an alarming picture of Parenthood In The Suburbs; eveyone, including the very young children, is on some sort of mood-stabilizing medication; the children are scheduled, dieted, and psychoanalyzed to within inches of their lives; the main focus of eveyone's life is money, possessions, and how to get them. It's a society full of living corpses, which is where I suppose Ellis got the idea to turn his book into a horror novel. This proves to be a mistake. The second half of the novel wobbles badly because he simply doesn't have the storytelling chops to make it work. Elite critics can sneer at Stephen King all they like, but he is a master of his craft, and Ellis suffers badly by comparison. Ellis just piles up one horrific incident after another and hopes they cohere into some kind of organic whole, which they really don't. The imagery in the climactic "attack" of the demons seems to have been inspired by the dog scenes in John Carpenter's masterpiece "The Thing."

The most striking thing about this book is how, depending on how literally you take it, Bret Ellis hates himself. The demons attack because they want to force him to confront the "disaster" of his life. The ghost of his father ("Hamlet" is also a big influence) wants to warn Ellis of an impending loss, as well as to force Bret into dealing with his memory. These metaphors are powerful and true and overcome much of the technical messiness of the book. As a man enters middle age the past screams at him for resolution, and Ellis does his best to meet the challenge in this flawed, interesting book

This really surprised me. Despite what some of the major reviews have implied, this book has very little of the sort of druggy debauchery, and none of the sex, that Ellis' earlier books are known for, despite a plot which forces us to travel back through those same books. What it does have - and have in spades - is a sense of underlying dread that, while present in much of his previous writing, has never been brought to life quite this well. It's horror, but a dreamy horror, more like Lovecraft or Poe than Thomas Harris. Another reviewer here likened `Lunar Park' to Stephen King, and while that reviewer meant it as an insult (I think) it's not a bad comparison. This is a book filled with ghouls and hallucinations, but also real-world horrors: alcoholism, self-hatred, and `antagonism', which, as we learn from a well-drawn exorcist towards the end of the novel, can literally turn a man to ash. There is also the horror of children. In `Lunar Park' we are both afraid FOR them, and afraid OF them - one minute they're having nightmares and need protecting, the next minute they're keeping secrets from us and possibly faking their own abductions. The parents in the book all medicate their kids mercilessly, which only serves to underscore the separation between parents and children, between our lives as we would like to see them, and our lives as they really are.

And then there's the writing. It's wonderful. There's a passage on p.55 - "The newspapers kept stroking my fear. New surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything..." - that offers one of the better descriptions of the post-9/11 mindset I've come across. And the last few pages, in which Ellis makes a shaky truce with the ghost of his father, are heartbreaking (my eyes filled up - I'm not kidding). The only weak scene in the book is the Halloween party that kicks off the whole story - the dialogue between Ellis and Jay McInerney (who makes a cameo appearance) seems so empty that one wonders why Ellis bothered writing it down (then again, maybe he was making a point about those brat-pack days of yore). But this is nitpicking - on the whole Ellis is terrific here.

**On a side note, one book that `Lunar Park' seems to echo, and not just in its title, is John Cheever's classic "Bullet Park." Cheever's book was another story of suburban horror, drenched in alcohol and general despair, with an ending that Ellis could only admire: a guy uses a chainsaw to cut through the doors of a church to save his son from being burned to death by a cold-blooded sadist. Ellis' book does for our generation what Cheever's did for his, and they make great tandem reading (I went back and reread Cheever right after `Lunar Park.')

Lunar Park is a supposedly true account of terrifying hauntings that occurred in writer Bret Easton Ellis's life over a series of days immediately following Halloween. Ellis's first chapter alone makes the book a worthwhile read--he recounts his entire life, all of his published novels, all of his excesses, and it makes for great reading. Any Ellis fan should definitely read the first chapter to see a glimpse inside a larger-than-life literary figure.

Starting in Chapter 2, the strange occurrences in his small Northeast college town start taking place. Ellis is, for the first time, trying to live a family life with the mother of his eleven-year-old son, as well as her younger daughter by another man. Ellis is haunted my memories of his father, his father's death, and mysterious emails at the time of night when his father died. Then murders ala Patrick Bateman from American Psycho start occurring in the town (but not in the newspapers), and the Ellis household starts to unravel completely. No one believes Ellis's accounts of the hauntings due to his excessive drinking and drug use. Ellis himself casts doubt on many of the occurrences. His children witness some of the hauntings, but prove to be unreliable witnesses when questioned by other grown-ups after the fact.

One shocking aspect of the book has nothing to do with the hauntings, but with Ellis's conflict with his super-children and the way privileged youngsters are raised these days. Ellis is coming off being a hard-partying self-reliant (but not completely functional) man, and it is hard for him to relate to his children, who are on numerous cocktails of medications to perfect their behavior. They attend a school where violent costumes aren't permitted for Halloween because some children might get scared, but when children tried to find "appropriate" costumes, everyone freaked out en masse, so no Halloween costumes at all were permitted. They go to birthday parties which have "rehearsal" parties to ensure that all the young attendees will get along and respond positively to the enrichment activities. None of the food at these parties contains any dairy, wheat, gluten, or corn syrup (heaven forbid!). At dinner parties, parents obsessively discuss nothing but their children--nursery school as a "portal" into the world, acupuncture for nine-year-olds, the need to cut pasta from the school lunch program, Pilate's for two-year-olds, all of which Ellis describes as a fanatical need for parents to get a return on their investment [p. 133]. At parent-teacher conferences, Ellis overhears a teacher explaining to a concerned couple that the average platypus should look "less deranged" than the one their child drew. The reader can hardly blame Ellis for turning to alcohol to zone-out from this child-obsessed world, so foreign from anything he's lived in before.

Overall, this book is creepy, as Ellis continues to see and experience stranger and stranger things, and no rational adult believes what he is witnessing. It'll keep you up late at night if you try to read it then. It also provides excellent insight into why Ellis wrote American Psycho and how it related to his true-life experiences with his father. I would recommend this book to any Ellis fan as a must-read, because of what he reveals about his personal life, but as someone who has only read one Ellis book (Less Than Zero), it was still completely readable. Ellis doesn't assume the reader knows anything about his novels, and fully explains any references. Pick this one up and prepare to be chilled!