Book Review: The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

The autumn of 1981 was probably the best time of my life with no worries, but out on the west coast, the fictional version of Bret Easton Ellis was facing his senior year in high school, a mysterious new boy in school and a fascination with a cult and serial killer.

Beginning on the day before Labor Day, Bret and his friends, Susan and Thom go to the Malibu stables where his girlfriend Debbie, keeps her horse. She has plans on entering the horse into a competition, plus she wants to show him off to the group.

Later that night, she's hosting a party and while Bret really doesn't want to be there, he goes anyway and is surprised to find his crush Ryan Vaughn there.

Ryan doesn't like the group but is friends with Thom since the two are on the football team. After Ryan leaves, the talk turns to the new boy Robert Mallory, who's coming to Buckley for his senior year.

With his parents on a three-month cruise, Bret has the house to himself and after meeting Robert, he can't place where he's seen him before and in going through his memory bank, remembers seeing him a year earlier at the second day showing of The Shining.

Robert tells him that he wasn't in Los Angeles at the time, but Bret remembers him vividly since he found him beyond attractive. Bret doesn't believe him and gets strange vibes from him since his story doesn't seem to match up.

After school, he starts to follow Robert and then Robert starts to follow Bret as he makes his way to the Galleria, where he loses Robert but not for long. Bret confronts him and tells him that he knows it was him at the theatre, but again Robert denies it.

Bret has plans to invite Ryan over for the weekend, but Susan invites herself, Thom and Debbie over to the house to plan a "welcome" party for Robert which Bret doesn't want to help throw.

The next day, Bret goes over to loner/stoner Matt Kellner's house uninvited, and they have sex, but their secret affair ends when Bret tries to find out what he and Robert were talking about, plus he's becoming more and more jealous of Robert.

Following a sex fuelled weekend with Ryan, Bret reads about another girl disappearing. According to the newspaper, she had plans to watch the fifth season premiere of Dallas but never returned from the mall in Woodland Hills. This makes Bret begin to wonder more about Robert and the following week, Matt disappears for a week until his body his found in the family swimming pool.

Bret suspects foul play with Matt since he noticed subtle changes in Matt's pool house and their argument was over Bret calling and hanging up. Both boys knew that Matt rarely talked on the phone and trysts were always a spur of the moment thing.

He tries to tell his circle of friends that Robert isn't normal and thinks that he killed Matt, even though the autopsy report says it was an accident, but Bret saw pictures of Matt's body and knows that it was murder, which no one believes.

Convinced that Robert's behind Matt's death, he starts to follow him again to an abandoned house where Robert pops into and then heads back to his aunt's condo in Century City. Bret is also aware of a beige van following him as well.

When Thom goes to Boston for a week, he asks Bret to keep an eye on Susan and later that night, he finds out that Susan has gone to Palm Springs to visit her grandparents. Since Susan never mentioned going away for the weekend, Bret calls Robert and his aunt tells him that he's also gone away for the weekend, to Rancho Mirage.

The next morning, he heads to Palm Springs and later follows Susan and Robert to a restaurant. Susan confronts him and later that night at his aunt's house, he's awoken by a noise outside and realizes that someone is trying to get into the house.

When he has the chance, he quickly leaves and heads back to Los Angeles and when he gets home, he finds a cassette tape in the mailbox and the family dog is missing and things rearranged inside the house (another sign of The Trawler).

Debbie ends up missing and no one will listen to Bret's theory that she's been abducted by The Trawler and after listening to the tape, he's one hundred percent certain that Robert is The Trawler and knows that he has to be stopped by taking things into his own hands.

By all means this is a really good suspense/thriller, but it does have pros and cons, with the cons winning.

If you are interested in reading this, be prepared to become very bored since there's a lot of buildup to what's about to happen, the book is written in the first-person narrative (which I hate) and whenever Bret gets into his car, it's like reading The Californians skit on Saturday Night Live with all of the expressways and streets he takes. I can pretty much say that I can go to Los Angeles and drive with confidence without getting lost.

On the positive side, Ellis does an excellent job with putting you into the autumn of 1981 by using specific dates for television shows (and their air dates) and the soundtrack of the time. There were a few times while reading that a certain song and or artist popped up on my XM radio.

I also felt that the book moved a lot faster when there was dialogue, which is rather sparse throughout the 597 pages. The last fifty or sixty pages seem to be the best but there are good page turning scenes throughout.