Saw the movie and a big fan of the book told me it doesn’t do the book justice. I was about to go buy it when I saw I had it (along with Altered States and Requiem for a Dream) in my massive pile of books I havent read yet.
What did yall think about the book? If I remember correctly a feminist reimagining is coming
No, American Psycho is definitely worse than Blood Meridian. In Blood Meridian you have Indians smashing babies on rocks and offscreen pedophilia murder, but in American Psycho a guy is cutting the lips off a woman with scissors, then raping her. Far far worse than Stephen King and probably the worst I've read or watched. Not sure what was going on, but Bret Easton Ellis is gay and probably tapped into some psychosadistic part of his personality.
It's kind of a shame because the concept of the book is pretty good and some chapters are hilarious. The movie and the book have different high/low points, but overall the movie is a better package because the violence isn't intense to the point of distraction.
I thought American Psycho was a very surface level story. It presents these scenarios to the reader that seem horrific, but I found that I wasn't drawn into the characters psychology at all during these events. It was like watching a scene happen outside the actual perpetrator or victims mind instead of being forced to live the scene out inside the perpetrator or the victims mind.
It is 100% a surface level story, especially because the protagonist is a sociopath who is incapable of thinking about the world outside of pop cultural clichés and banalities that he uses to fool other people into thinking he is normal. It does that gimmick very well. But Blood Meridian is obviously in a completely different league, being one of the greatest novels of the last 50 years.