Bret Easton Ellis’s comeback is a bloody masterpiece
Bret Easton Ellis has a secret. It’s what happened to him and his friends in the fall of 1981 in his senior year at Buckley, a private high school in Sherman Oaks, California. It’s about a hippie cult and serial killer known as “The Trawler” and the disappearance of his friends. It’s about how all this is somehow tied to the arrival of a new student that year, Robert Mallory. It’s a true story. The Shards is Ellis’s seventh novel, published nearly thirteen years after his previous book, Imperial Bedrooms. He has tried to write this novel twice before, once when he was nineteen and again when he was forty-two. That second attempt led to an anxiety attack that had Ellis rushed to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai. At least, that’s the story.
