"'Many years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written' is how his new novel, The Shards, his first in thirteen years, begins."

"It is narrated by Ellis’s alter ego, a fifty-six-year-old writer named Bret.... Bret listens to bands such as Icehouse and Ultravox (he especially likes the song 'Vienna,' with its soaring, mournful refrain, 'This means nothing to me') and spends weekends at parties or the movies, or in his room working on the book that will one day become Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero (1985).... Ellis published Less Than Zero when he was a twenty-one-year-old student at Bennington College. Its cultural impact is hard to overstate. The book is narrated by Clay.... Clay drives around, does drugs, goes to parties, and remembers his dead grandparents.... ... Ellis’s desire to see the worst is so all-consuming that it blinds him to anything else. He has a once-in-a-generation talent for conjuring dread and disgust and exposing them as the consequences of a sick, hollow, and narcissistic culture; he’s also funny. But the truth that lies beneath the surface of the world is not that we are depraved authors of Boschian nightmares; it’s that our Boschian nightmares exist alongside acts of love, compassion, faithfulness. Ellis’s stark and unsentimental moral vision is blind to half of human truth, and in this way has remained as childlike as the innocence it wants to dispel...."

Writes the novelist Christine Smallwood, in "The Exorcist/Bret Easton Ellis’s novels are filled with beautiful actors in nightmarish dreamscapes who seem innocent but are revealed to be guilty" (NYRB).

You can buy "The Shards" here. I've never read a Bret Easton Ellis book. Have you? I've never seen a movie based on one of his books either. I'm not recommending the new book, just observing its publication and trying to understand what Christine Smallwood is saying about it. Maybe read her novel: "The Life of the Mind."