American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis
 Set in Manhattan during the Wall Street boom of the late 1980s, American Psycho is about the daily life of wealthy young investment banker Patrick Bateman. Bateman, in his late 20s when the story begins, narrates his everyday activities, from his recreational life among the Wall Street elite of New York to his forays into murder by nightfall. Through present tense stream-of-consciousness narrative, Bateman describes his daily life, ranging from a series of Friday nights spent at nightclubs with his colleagues — where they snort cocaine, critique fellow club-goers' clothing, trade fashion advice, and question one another on proper etiquette — to his loveless engagement to fellow yuppie Evelyn and his contentious relationship with his brother and senile mother. Bateman's stream of consciousness is occasionally broken up by chapters in which he directly addresses the reader in order to critique the work of 1980s Pop music artists. The novel maintains a high level of ambiguity through mistaken identity and contradictions that introduce the possibility that Bateman is an unreliable narrator. Characters are consistently introduced as people other than themselves, and people argue over the identities of others they can see in restaurants or at parties. Whether any of the crimes depicted in the novel actually happened or whether they were simply the fantasies of a delusional psychotic is deliberately left open. After killing Paul Owen, one of his colleagues, Bateman appropriates his apartment as a place to kill and store more victims. Bateman's control over his violent urges deteriorates. His murders become increasingly sadistic and complex, progressing from simple stabbings to drawn out sequences of torture, rape, mutilation, cannibalism, and necrophilia, and the separation between his two lives begins to blur. He introduces stories about serial killers into casual conversations and on several occasions openly confesses his murderous activities to his coworkers, who never take him seriously, do not hear what he says, or misunderstand him completely—for example, hearing the words "murders and executions" as "mergers and acquisitions." Bateman begins to experience bizarre hallucinations such as seeing a Cheerio interviewed on a talk show, being stalked by an anthropomorphic park bench, and finding a bone in his Dove Bar. These incidents culminate in a shooting spree during which he kills several random people in the street, resulting in a SWAT team being dispatched in a helicopter. Bateman flees on foot and hides in his office, where he phones his attorney, Harold Carnes, and confesses all his crimes to the answering machine. Later, Bateman confronts Carnes about the message only to find Carnes is amused at what he considers to be a good joke. Carnes tells Bateman that he is too much of a coward to have committed such acts and claims that he had dinner in London with Paul Owen a few days before. Bateman revisits Paul Owen's apartment, where he had killed and mutilated two prostitutes. Bateman enters the perfectly clean, refurbished apartment, which shows no trace of decomposing bodies but is filled with strong-smelling flowers, as though meant to hide a bad odor. He runs into a real estate agent showing the apartment to prospective buyers; the real-estate agent appears suspicious of Bateman. The book ends as it began, with Bateman and his colleagues in a club on a Friday night, engaging in banal conversation.