Books like The Informers
The Informers
Ah Bret, I loved you so, so long ago. For anyone who has not had the mixture of pleasure, horror, disgust and loathing which is generated by the reading of American Psycho, then you should probably start here to ease your way into the dismissive, violent and destructive world which Ellis describes. I read American Psycho in one long teenage school day (under desks during class/ behind a wall at break/ on the bus home) and was amazed that this man was actually a fully functioning author and not a psychopathic murderer who, I would happily have believed, penned his most famous of novels from the constraints of a padded room by narrating his tale into a dictophone after he was deemed too dangerous to be given a pen.To compare The Informers to American Psycho is like comparing a watered down lemon cordial to a shot of rocket fuel. The comparison is largely meaningless because American Psycho is so far off the scale of brilliant wrongness that there is no scale capable of measuring it accurately. The brutality, drug taking, narcisism and general self-absorbed-bastarditis exhibited in The Informers is not in the same category but it is still present and grubby. You won't like any of the people who inhabit these pages but that's ok ... maybe they are there to be despised so we can all feel better about ourselves. Thanks Bret, I feel like a paragon of crystalline virtue now.