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Lunar Park

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Lunar Park

By: Bret Easton Ellis
Narrated by: James Van Der Beek
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About this listen

He became a best-selling novelist while still in college, immediately famous and wealthy. He watched his insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box. He was lost in a haze of booze, drugs and vilification.

Then he was given a second chance.

This is the life of Bret Easton Ellis, the author and subject of this remarkable novel. Confounding one expectation after another, Lunar Park is equally hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking. It’s the most original novel of an extraordinary career - and best of all: it all happened, every word is true.

©2019 Bret Easton Ellis (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Biographical Fiction Dark Humour Fiction Genre Fiction Horror Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Biography Witty Comedy

Critic reviews

“Great emotional complexity and depth...it’s a very interesting ride with an always interesting novelist – and, as such, is one worth taking.” (The Times)

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I am an unapologetic Brett Easton Ellis fan. For whatever reason I had never read this book before. It’s a stunner. Really enjoyable and the narration is superb. There is also a short and very interesting interview with the author at the end of the book itself. It would make a great club choice.

Wonderful narration of an excellent novel

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I can't believe I waited so long to read this book. I loved BEE's first 2 books which I read back in the 80s (and several times since). I didn't enjoy American Psycho quite as much although could appreciate its place in American literature. I found Glamorama too long and tedious so didn't read anything BEE since, until now. But Lunar Park is so personal and emotional in ways I didn't expect. It's a very mature prose mascarading as a mock memoire / Stephen King homage ghost/ haunted house horror story. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Sublime

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One of my favourite books from Brett Easton Ellis. After The Shards. So creative . A great horror read.

One of my favourites

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Love Brett Easton Ellis and this book was fantastic. The narration by James van der Beek was superb.

Amazing

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Ellis’s 2005 ‘mock memoir’ - which he began outlining in 1989 - is partly an homage to Stephen King (who liked Lunar Park, or said he did!) and is very loosely a sequel to Ellis’s own American Psycho. It’s also a clever exploration of fame and a perceptive social satire, playing around with genre boundaries. Fatherhood - and the relationship between fathers and sons - are central themes. The narrator of Lunar Park - Ellis’s first novel written in the past tense - is one Bret Easton Ellis (a postmodern trick he recently repeated in The Shards). We never know precisely how much of what he relates is true - but a lot of it is entirely plausible. He outlines his hedonistic life on book tours before settling down in suburbia with his film-star wife Jayne and their troubled son, Robby - a son Ellis initially didn’t want. The novel then becomes a horror story as Ellis and his family are the subject of paranormal events. They’re terrorised by ghostly or demonic forces which appear to be rooted in Ellis’s turbulent childhood. Some of the best and most darkly comic passages focus on suburbia and Ellis’s rich, materialistic neighbours and their psychologically damaged children. The narration by James Van Der Beek, who played Sean Bateman in the 2002 movie adaptation of Ellis’s novel The Rules of Attraction, is superb. A highlight of this Audible title is the chat with enigmatic Ellis at the end. The wonderfully poetic, Joycean ending of Lunar Park is arguably Ellis’s finest writing. It’s the only novel of his that I’ve revisited so far, around seven years after I read all of them, more or less consecutively. Lunar Park is also a novel about writing - the narrator teaches creative writing and is working on another shocking novel - until he’s distracted by supernatural happenings. If you’re new to Ellis, his debut was Less Than Zero and his best novel has to be American Psycho. But Lunar Park is, appropriately, one of his most haunting stories.

Horror in suburbia

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