I was excited for this as the author has pedigree. Unfortunately it really didn’t pique my interest and keep my attention so I had to abandon it and move on.

Great listen. It’s been years since I first discovered this author but love their style, the way they craft the narrative and what a punch it packs!

I loved the book so much I had to have the audio version too!
The paper copy review is also below:

I have been a fan of Bret Easton Ellis since I was in my late teens. I have read and re-read every single piece of work he’s produced, and I can’t express how excited I was about the Shards when it was announced. The Shards was 100% worth the wait – it took me a while to digest to be able to write a review. True to Bret Ellis’s style, this is another “autobiographical” work where we meet the Author in his teenage years. I was delighted to be thrown back into the atmosphere of the rich, and the famous, and the Numb. However, this was so much more sinister than some of the previous works. Bret Easton Ellis is no stranger to violence in his novels, but in the Shards we get to experience some deeply disturbing and unsettling events that happen to Bret and his friends at school. The writing was so utterly absorbing it gave me chills. True to his style, the author deploys the unreliable narrator threads where we are no longer sure what and whom to believe. Overall, I thought it was a little on the long side but having said that – I didn’t want it to end because it was unputdownable. The whole blend of fact and fiction is masterful, and I take my hat off!

Have you heard the one about spoiled rich kids in Los Angeles? If so, Bret Easton Ellis probably tells it better than anyone else.

Bret Easton Ellis is an acclaimed American author whose controversial novels offer a satirical glimpse into the dark side of American culture.

The Shards is his first novel in thirteen years and bookends his previous work. The premise will be familiar to fans:

Something something rich kids, something something the 80s, something something bad things happen.

But, much like a good joke, it's all about the delivery. Oh, yeah, and did I mention that there's a serial killer?

Ellis gained widespread recognition for his debut novel "Less Than Zero" which was published in 1985.

The Shards is basically a fictional memoir of Ellis's traumatic senior year of high school which led to the writing of that book.

When a serial killer known as the Trawler terrorises Bret's friends, he suspects that the new kid at school may have something to do with it.

It's a bit more complicated than that of course — and a damn sight darker, weirder, and funnier — but the truth is in the telling.

The Shards is at turns bleak, warped, and laugh-out-loud funny. It's the way that he tells them.

I've tried to get into this book multiple times and unfortunately the style just isn't for me so I've had to mark it as a did not finish.

Framed as an autobiographical, true crime writing about a teenager living an extremely privileged life on Mulholland Drive. Bret diarises his experiences of life when of a string of murders committed by someone known as ‘The Trawler’ begin taking place in the surrounding area.


Bret is a high school student, with many wealthy friends and is experimenting with his sexuality in an era when it was a lot more taboo. There is a lot of eroticism, as a sort of stream of consciousness, unfortunately I found it very repetitive. Most of the characters are unlikable and completely oblivious of the lubrication which wealth and privilege allows as you move through life. That being said, I suppose most people aren’t that self aware at that age and characters do not necessarily need to be 'likeable'.

It really reminded me of a male oriented Pretty Little Liars. I’m fairly sure this isn’t what he was going for, instead trying to be profound … but it doesn’t really achieve it. Whilst it was entertaining (at least from about 40% onwards), nearly every choice ‘Bret’ makes in this story is totally illogical and personally I found it far too drawn out and meandering, losing interest in parts. Although I did enjoy the nostalgic nature of the writing, overall it just came across as self indulgent. It’s kind of a shame it wasn’t edited down, because I think it has the potential to be very good and I really enjoyed the ending.


The narrator, BEE himself is great and has a wonderful reading voice and style. I know that author read audiobooks are not always favoured, but I enjoy them as you know the emphasis and understanding is in the right areas.

2.5 rounded up.

The Shards is an absorbing, riveting, and terrifying exploration of numbness, obsession, and sexual nostalgia.

Part metafiction, part coming-of-age story, part serial-killer thriller, The Shards is classic Bret Easton Ellis. Fans of Bret's earlier works will be well fed.

Yes it is long, yes the narrative is meandering, yes we get a constant update on every road the protagonist drives on and every song he listens to, but this is all part of Bret Easton Ellis' style and world-building. The girls who get it, get it.

I particularly enjoyed Bret Easton Ellis' audiobook narration. I've found that some audiobooks read by the author lack theatricality but Bret nails the mood.

I highly recommend this book / audiobook - but be warned, there are a few descriptions of animal abuse that are horrifically off-putting and I could have done without. .

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC of the audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

Bret Easton Ellis is one of those author who were huge when I was much younger and wrote one of the most shocking book i read: American Psycho.
That said I was curious to list to this audiobook and I found intriguing the idea of the author telling the story that could be fiction or autobiography.
I think I would have preferred to read it because I wasn't a fan of the author's voice that I found a bit too flat.
It's very long and I took me ages.
Something more compact and a voice more nuanced would have helped.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

The author opens up with a section telling how it’s taken him some forty years to write this book. It is, he says, based on events he witnessed; acts of violence perpetrated on people he knew, friends. He discloses that he’d tried to write the book years ago but at that time the act of recalling events he’d lived through had freaked him out so much he’d ended up in hospital, suffering from the mother of all panic attacks. When he was a high school senior, at seventeen years of age, a new boy had arrived at his school and joined his friendship group. This boy, it was later revealed, had had a difficult past and though on the face of it he seemed to be fully adjusted, he was actually anything but. He was to become a killer and at least one of Bret’s close friends was going to get seriously hurt.

Bret Easton Ellis attended The Buckley School in Los Angeles, an establishment available to the rich and pampered. At the time of the events he covers here his parents were away on a long trip abroad, so he’d been left at home for an extended period with the family dog and a maid who prepared his breakfast and cleaned up after him. All his friends similarly lived in grand houses, drove expensive cars and seemed to have free rein to do whatever they wanted. In addition, they all had access to the drugs of their choice. Bret had a girlfriend, Debbie, but in all honesty he wasn’t sure if he preferred guys; he was at that juncture where adolescence is about to make way to adulthood, but he wasn’t quite there – he references this thought a number of times.

Set in 1981, Bret talks a lot about the music he and his friends were listening to, and this fixed the timeframe in my mind too, with British singers such as Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello and Glenn Tilbrook also being amongst my favourites in the early Eighties. Having been transfixed by the opening section I truly believed I was reading a true account of events Bret had lived through, and yet as I came across long conversations which repeated seemingly verbatim and detailed recollections regarding his own thoughts at that time, I concluded that a degree of artistic license was in play. So what was this: a factual account, a piece of fiction or something in between? I couldn’t really work it out. But I didn’t dwell on this too long as either way I was fully invested by now.

It’s a lengthy story - I listened to a 22 hour long audio version, read by the author – but every time I paused I just couldn’t wait to get back to it. I found it to be such a compelling story, and hearing it told through Bret’s voice added something for me. It just felt right. There’s a lot sex and violence here, much of it very graphic. There are other disturbing scenes too, so this one is definitely not for the squeamish or faint-hearted. But there is a richness in the writing and in the narrative that I believe lifts it above all but the very best books. As I approached the end I thought I’d worked it all out, but a surprising and somewhat ambiguous ending cast some doubt on that. It’s definitely one of the most mysterious, addictive and truly impactful books I’ve come across in a very long time.

The first book I’ve read by this author and I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m not usually keen on author narrators, but in this case, I thought the narration was excellent. It’s laid back and languid and it goes with the narrative style, which is meandering.

This story is apparently a blend of fact and fiction. I haven’t looked into the background to determine how that balances out; I’ve taken the book at face value. It’s a strange mix of musings and events. At first I found it difficult to settle in to what was going on as there are timeline changes and I wasn’t clear who was who. I tackled it in smaller bites than usual with an audio book. There are some parts that move on at a fair pace and the rest is occasionally rather drawn out. Sometimes it felt as if the entire book was written in separate chunks which were then pulled together. It’s certainly atmospheric. I had the sense of menace, expectation and creepiness as the newcomer to the privileged group is suspected of involvement in murder. I actually found the narration quite relaxing, and it created a rhythm to the text. But it doesn’t quite hang together overall and perhaps needs editing to give it better pace and crispness. I was invested in the take; it’s quite complex and compelling, but it’s not quite hitting the spot to keep me gripped non stop. It’s very well written and I wanted to know how it panned out, so completed the book. A 3,5 which I’ll round up to a 4 because there are redeeming moments, particularly towards the end.

My thanks to the publisher for a review copy via Netgalley.

Very very long. Had its moments, would have kept my interest at half the length.

Loved American Psycho and I loved the idea of a fictionalised autobiography based around real murders. I also love a good audio-read, and this is read by the author. He's a great narrator actually, I had no issues with his voice or enthusiasm for his own material.

But the length really did become a chore, when not a lot does happen for much of this, or the same sorts of things happen a lot. I understand this started life as a podcast first, which possibly explains why things are repeated and the action is so slow to move to a conclusion.

Based around the real Trawler murders in 1980-1981, Bret seats himself front and centre as a high school student, a closeted gay student with a girlfriend and a novel he's trying to get down on paper. Bret and his friends are privileged, they are surrounded by opportunities for sex, drugs, drinking, and they seem to willingly partake.

All the while, Bret is both keeping an eye on the reports of local murders of teenagers and finding connections to the new kid in school, Robert Mallory, whom he is both attracted to and suspicious of.

I think I'd have found this easier to concentrate on if it were tighter, there's so much navel gazing and gratuitous sex going on that I almost forget what the plot was working towards. Like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood there is a killer (excuse the pun) ending, with action a-plenty for American Psycho fans, but it was a long slog to get there. I did like the wrapping up, the unanswered questions. I haven't read any other of the author's works aside from these two, and wouldn't have connected them as by the same writer actually.

This would make a good mini-series, plenty of gore, wealth, graphic sex and young bodies to display. A challenging read though, requiring a bit of stamina.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing a sample audio cop

It’s hard to tell if this book is fiction or an autobiography, I have never read any of the authors previous (I know I am a heathen) saying I enjoyed this would be somewhat of a liberty but neither did I endure this book, it was an experience. If I have a complaint then it is the narration is not to my taste