Dr. Alex E. Blazer
Department of English
Georgia College & State University
Milledgeville, GA 31061
Bret Easton Ellis's The Shards and the Horror of Autofiction
Bret Easton Ellis's recent serialized autofiction, coming-of-age, serial killer novel The Shards (2023) continues the author’s tarrying with youthful angst (Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, The Informers), serial killer fiction (American Psycho, Imperial Bedrooms), and metafiction (Glamorama, Lunar Park), but it does so with and from the wiser perspective of middle-age looking back on how the corrupting traumas of youth passing into adulthood form not only a cool numbness in the general culture but also a maddeningly melancholic imagination in the specific writer. Just as Lunar Park sutured together the metafiction and haunted house genres in order for the forty-something author-narrator Bret Easton Ellis to contemplate giving birth to iconic serial killer Patrick Bateman, The Shards frames the fifty-something author-narrator Bret Easton Ellis remembering the fall of his 1981 senior year of high school creating the numb characterological core of Less Than Zero while having his writerly imagination filled with violence and paranoia by a serial killer nicknamed the Trawler and death cult called Riders of the Afterlife. The novel simultaneously builds on the radical uncertainty of the unreliable, because delusional, narrator in American Psycho (here it's unclear if the author-narrator is victim or perpetrator); the sympathetic hero of one novel turned potential maniac of its sequel in Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms (the victimized Bret Easton Ellis of Lunar Park becomes the unraveling antihero of The Shards); and the cross-pollination of metafiction and madness of Glamorama's film crew and director (the narrator of The Shards is a "tangible participant" of the "pantomine" "narrative" conversing with the writer). The Shards employs autofiction, or fictionalized autobiography, to study a writer's creative inwardness born and reared of ever-dueling instincts of self-destruction and desire.
This abstract summarizes my presentation, "Bret Easton Ellis's The Shards and the Horror of Autofiction." Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association. Tropicana Casino & Resort, Atlantic City, NJ. 9 Nov. 2024.3.