Bret Easton Ellis — Lunar Park

Bret Easton Ellis is an author from Los Angeles, known mostly for the infamous American Psycho. If you read Ellis before, you are familiar with the themes of his books. It is essentially a critic of the wealthy and famous of the american society. It describes shallow people, leading shallow lives often with terrible consequences. The writing is direct, honest, disturbing, filled with dark humor and often downright violent.

So when I took Lunar Park and started to read, I was essentially expecting the same kind of story. And for some time, it was the typical Easton Ellis book. It seemed like an autobiographical description of the life of the author, his struggle with drugs, his broken marriage and his life in the suburbs of California. But most of all, it was a book about his difficulty being a father and the difficulty forgiving his own father for his lost childhood.

Until the book turns upside down and it literally transforms into a horror novel. The quiet suburb house progressively becomes an haunted house, the main character is haunted by his father's ghost. Suddenly I had the pleasure of reading a typical horror story. It could have been a Stephen King book for all I know.

Bret Easton Ellis usually has nothing to do with the world of horror literature but Lunar Park is a fun homage to the genre. And behind the horror, Lunar Park tells two stories. The story of a child abandoned by his father and the story of a father abandoning his child.