Spontaneous Musings

My problem with American Pyscho, which I read about two years ago, was the mind-numbing repetitiveness of the prose. For a while, I liked the satire of having Patrick Batemen recite the full description and price-list of every article of clothing or item he encounters, because it really nailed his cold, substanceless yuppie lack-of-soul. But it soon crosses the line into just plain overkill, no pun intended. And then, as you said, some of the moments of violence were so nauseatingly disgusting and off-putting that you wonder who Ellis is even writing for. The film version, I thought, did a far better job of focusing the narrative, by toning down the violence and accentuating the satire. The questioning of reality also added to a more multi-layered story, as both the idea that he has been imagining all of these horror movie scenarios or the notion that all of the yuppies are so interchangable and New York has become so indifferent to human emotion and suffering that no one notices his crimes, work.