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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis

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20:43 / 31.05.05

The new book is scheduled to come out August 16th, 2005 in the United States and Canada.

Here's what it looks like in the UK:

From the inside flap:
"Imagine becoming a best-selling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs.

Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety—only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father’s, his stepdaughter’s doll violently “malfunctions,” and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events—a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son’s age—Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania.

Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution—about love and loss, fathers and sons—in what is surely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career."

Click here for the official website

Click here to buy it from Amazon.uk (and support Barbelith) or click here to buy it from Amazon.com

So after all that introduction, who is looking forward to this book? Ellis is one of my top five favorite authors of all time, so I'm biased. What about you kind folks? (And here I turn the microphone to you)

Regrettable Juvenilia

23:02 / 31.05.05

I am excited but nervous.

This sounds like simultaneously a departure for Ellis and the continuation of his obsession with unreliable narrators, "are these terrible things real or imagined?", etc. Problem is, those ideas have become extremely familiar in the past five years, arguably as a result of Ellis' influence. We shall see...

I wonder what happened to the political satire set in Washington that Ellis originally claimed was going to follow Glamorama?

01:37 / 01.06.05

Okay, so - what - it's some kind of metafiction starring Brett as not-quite himself?

m.

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04:37 / 01.06.05

The only book of his I've read is "American Psycho" (which I love, definetly in my top ten) and right now I'm halfway through "Glamorama" (which I like so far). So, yeah, I'm looking foward to it. I know people who have read it who say it's a lot more streamlined and mainstream then his other novels, so, we'll see...

I should say here I changed my user name before I saw this thread. Synchronicity and nothing more.

17:18 / 06.06.05

Ta-dah! The cover as it appears in North America:

And it's designed by It-Artist of the decade: Chip Kidd!

Yay!

17:41 / 07.06.05

That is a better cover.

Fucking Americans...

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21:05 / 07.06.05

I've seen the British cover. It's kinda ass...

13:54 / 13.06.05

Check out these bizarre websites concocted by the publisher:

Two Brets

Jayne Dennis, who is Bret's wife in the novel.

Regrettable Juvenilia

15:16 / 13.06.05

A metatextual Mysteries Of Pittsburgh joke. Oh, I'm such a sucker.

15:13 / 17.06.05

Thanks mlcmontgomery for posting this. I'm very much looking forward to reading it. I'd been vaguely following its release date up to the point when it was pencilled in for October. The August date is great news!

There's certain contemporary authors who I regularly monitor for new releases, and BEE is definitely one of them (every 6 months or so I'll do a little web reccy to see if anyone interesting has released something). This is very exciting.

21:10 / 21.06.05

Hey, who wrote the thread summary? Great rhyming scheme, but what the hell does it have to do with Bret? Wouldn't something like this be better:

I stand there listening to some band I forgot even existed and she smiles at me. I tell her to stop because it makes her look ugly. She asks if we want to read this new book. I say, "Who even reads anymore?"

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:24 / 21.06.05

Nope. It's a topic summary, not a fifth-former's rough book. The aim is to cram in the relevant information for the search function, in this case, the name of the author and the title of the book. However, moderators are a lazy lot, and as such the best way to get the topic summary you deserve is to add it when you start the thread.

21:40 / 21.06.05

Whatever

17:35 / 01.07.05

Click here to see if Bret's coming to your town. He's not coming to mine. Sigh.

23:15 / 03.07.05

I'm not sure if anyone who's called their shop 'Book Passage' shouldn't in fact just be shot.

13:19 / 15.08.05

LUNAR PARK comes out tomorrow!

Regrettable Juvenilia

13:44 / 15.08.05

The interviewer in yesterday's Observer is either a deeply credulous person who has misunderstood the basic nature of this novel already - or else they were playing along with the publicity gimmick...

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21:17 / 21.08.05

Anyone else read this yet? I finished it in a 24 hour period the day it came out... It really kept my interest. The supernatural stuff wasn't as wince-inducing as I thought it would be (though the Hamlet allusions were a little obvious... Of course, Ellis has never been bothered by subtelty). Not quite as brilliant as "American Psycho" or "Glamorama", but still a good effort all-in-all.

Regrettable Juvenilia

15:28 / 22.08.05

From the Lunar Park website:

UK Author Tour - Bret Easton Ellis

Saturday 8th October, 2-3pm
Signing at Waterstone’s Oxford

Saturday 8th October, 6.30pm
Event at The Times Cheltenham Festival of Literature

Monday 10th October, 7.30pm
Reading, ‘In conversation’, and signing at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London. Tickets 0870 160 2522 or rfh.org.uk

Tuesday 11th October, 7pm
Reading, ‘In conversation’, and signing at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. Tickets available from Waterstone's, 91 Deansgate: 0161 837 3000

Wednesday 12th October, 7pm
Reading, ‘In conversation’, and signing at Oran Mor, Glasgow. Tickets available from Borders, 98 Buchanan Street: 0141 222 7700

Tuesday 18th October, 6.30pm
Reading, ‘In conversation’, and signing at Trinity College, Dublin

16:13 / 22.08.05

can you put up a link to the observer article? searching their site for BEE is not working for me.

ONLY NICE THINGS

06:58 / 25.08.05

Offtopic - Syph, does this mean you no longer want to be banned from Barbelith? If not, you can email me your password and I will randomise your login details, because I'm nice.

14:36 / 25.08.05

I liked American Psycho, Rules of Attraction, and Glamorama, so I probably would have read Lunar Park at some point.... but then a read a review by Steve Almond in the Boston Globe that, well, "scathing" doesn't begin to describe. Unfortunately I don't still have the paper, and I don't want to pay to view it online, but much of the review involved picking out a sentence or two and scoffing at how cliched/redundant/crappy it is. Not having read the book, it's hard to say, but based on Almond's comments about other Ellis books it seems to me he doesn't really "get it" - isn't there a good probability that Ellis is poking fun at Ellis in the narrative? I always thought that characters like Victor and Sean were intentionally written to sound a bit stupid (or naive in the case of Lauren, or shallow in the case of Patrick). Almond's a member of the "dick lit" elite who may well be a great writer - I haven't read his novels but he certainly managed to turn me off to a writer I previously liked in about 500 words - but he came off like a pompous ass in this review. All the same, how can I read Lunar Park now?

Regrettable Juvenilia

14:43 / 25.08.05

Run your eyes over the words from left to right and top to bottom? I dunno, things I love get slated all the time, and I hold Ellis to be one of the most misunderstood authors of the past 20 years or so, so bad reviews are kinda par for the course...

02:20 / 29.08.05

I'm about a hundred pages into my copy, and I gotta say, this might be Ellis' worst novel yet. My reasons are thus: first of all, metafiction does not suit Ellis' glossy style whatsoever. It sort of worked for Glamorama, but only because of the main character's complete ignorance. With Lunar Park, I'm constantly being thrown off by these random supernatural incidents and these moments of "suspense" which is really just plain boring. Also, knowing a bit about Ellis makes reading this novel even harder. I'm consistently reading a line of dialogue spoken by Ellis and thinking to myself "That's not how he sounds in real life". It's pulling me out of the story and not in a good way.

But with authors as good as Ellis, even their worst novel is better than most of the schlock sitting around on shelves. Also, the worst piece by somebody talented is almost more interesting as a piece than the best one.

Anyway, so far, not a great novel. Still fucking better than Dan Brown.

Phex: Dorset Doom

06:10 / 30.08.05

Personally, I liked it. Glamorama is still my favorite of BEE's books, American Psycho second though he spends much of the book and many interviews denouncing it. Lunar Park is joint third with Rules of Attraction.
I think the problem with Ellis is that he may be a great, possibly classic writer who in years to come will sit alongside Hemmingway, Faulkner et al. or he may be a hack with a knack (rhyming unintentional) for masking his flaws. We just don't know, critics can't agree on it, and I don't think Ellis knows either. Lunar Park is very obviously his attempt to get out from the shadow of his previous work, especially American Psycho, and establish himself alongside the likes of Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth. It's a real shame that despite some clever conceits the only writer he really resembles (based on Lunar Park) is Chuck Palahniuk, and not vintage Palahniuk (Survivor) but Lullaby or Diary. Still, like matt says above, I'd still rather read an okay Bret Easton Ellis book than the best Dan Brown.

22:33 / 05.09.05

So I finished it, and I have to say, it's not as bad as the reviews make it out to be. It feels like an early Stephen King novel: the slow integration of the supernatural into the fucked up life and the disintegration of the psyche. I tolerated the first half of the novel and absolutely devoured the second half, just trying to get some answers (but I knew I would never get them). Anybody want to take a guess on the word Bret reads in the box? I'm going to say it's "Dad" or maybe "Daddy".

01:25 / 09.02.06

Well, months later, and I have to say... I love this book. I don't think I got it the first time. I think I was still expecting a BEE novel in the classical sense. Lunar Park is still a BEE novel, but it's actually more mature than any of his other books. He acknowledges the presence of his father in his life, in his work, in his future family. Lunar Park, I think, is heir to the same throne that The Turn of the Screw held; one is never sure if anything is real in this book, and that's the point, that it is a fucking novel and all you're doing is reading a fucking book. That's why it stars BEE, to create that effect.

I realized my love of this novel when I read this article at Slate Magazine. It's from August, but I never got around to reading it. Here's the bullet:
We come to understand that this is a story of a son who has been corrupted irrevocably by his father's abusive behavior, and who fears that he will likewise destroy his own son.
That's really what this is about, other than the shimmering effect of the metafiction. All the horrors are manifestations of the subconscious, or they are manifestations in print of the author/character. There's no answers to that, as in no answers to what's in that fucking box Bret finds. What does he read? Who knows? And I like it that way.

05:40 / 10.02.06

Stephen King wrote a good review of this in EW.

15:13 / 12.02.06

do you have a link to that review? i'd love to check that out. or if not, can you give us an upshot?

08:28 / 14.02.06

I'll look for a link. In short, Ellis said somewhere that he was a huge Stephen King fan when he was younger, and Lunar Park was like a love letter to King. King hears about this and checks out the book. King said that when he read Ellis' previous stuff he admired the writing but thought it lacked ooomph. He said Lunar was good.

Jawsus-son Starship

20:09 / 15.02.06

I thought the first chapter was fantastic - really, its crazy and brave and sets the idea behind the book into motion so quickly and them poof - it all disapears, and we get a slightly disapointing haunted house story. The themes are all strong, and all things that Ellis has writen before (and some would say better) in all his other books. Still, it felt like a decent departure from the usual. And I did enjoy it so very much. I kind of thought of it as an attempt for Ellis to put all his wishes into one basket, then set the basket on fire and get a deformed bird toy to butt fuck it.

17:01 / 21.02.06

I would love a Terby toy.

15:31 / 04.05.06

The novel as it appears in Europe. As well, there is a paperback tour announced with dates not set, and the paperback comes out August 15th, 2006, almost a year from the hardcover (take a lesson from this, publishers! Don't wait so long!)

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:04 / 03.07.06

Just finished it, and I really, really liked it.

I think its flaws (which it definitely does have) lie not in the metafictional aspects, which I think he handles exceptionally well (even knowing the nature of the novel before opening it, he sucks you in fairly convincingly for the beginning, and it's something of a readjustment to remind yourself that this IS actually a novel when you get a few pages in)- it's his foray into supernatural horror fiction, at which he isn't terrible- in fact, he's pretty good, but he's bad enough that the gap between that and his 5k177z at writing BEE novels is a little jarring. IE- my main problem isn't that the "bad" bits are particularly bad, just that the gulf in quality between the great bits and the "bad" bits is big enough for my disbelief to fall through.

Still one of the best books I've read in a while, though, and I found the last couple of pages unbearably sad, in a nice kind of way.

And when he's being funny- the party, the early parts of the PTA chapter- he's still fucking hilarious.

17:38 / 16.10.06

Here is a great article on the classification of the novel's genre. Really made me appreciate the novel even more. Lunar Park is becoming more and more my favorite BEE novel just because of its layers and its complexity.

From the article:
It is important to note that an element of this Generation X is its reliance on and consumption of popular culture, particularly films. It is perhaps here where Ellis hopes his perceived audience will have acquired the assumed knowledge required to appreciate the use of intertextuality and uses of code and conventions specific to the horror genre. A wider audience will have seen a Stephen King film adaptation than read one of his novels. This presumption is further reinforced in the passage quoted earlier. When Ellis writes "like something I had seen in a movie," and "the living room might well have been a screen and the house a theatre," it could be argued that he is informing the reader, giving them a cultural reference they will be familiar with, subconsciously, or even consciously, justifying the horror conventions used in the novel.

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