Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel is very winning, although it is hard to say anything nice about it. This most unpromising book, coming seven years after “Glamorama,” the author’s disastrous amplification of his “American Psycho”-style bloodsplatter and glamour, is a compulsive read, a delicious thing that you had not meant to eat.

Besides sporting the most dead-in-the-water title Mr. Ellis has ever produced, “Lunar Park” advertises itself as a boring spoof of the author’s previous work. A fictional Bret Easton Ellis moves to the suburbs, hoping to rebuild his life. He quits drinking, quits drugs (having almost perished in a heroin-related incident on the “Glamorama” book tour), and moves in with his barely acknowledged family. A tepid idyll almost turns potboiler when his McMansion shows signs of haunting, and a Patrick Bateman copycat appears, violently murdering locals who resemble the victims in “American Psycho.”

But in its own way “Lunar Park” is a success, a return to the autobiographical form of “Less Than Zero,” his cool, clean first novel. “Glamorama” tried to take a profound perspective on networks, Don DeLillo-style; the automatic result was an overlong novel about terrorist fashion models. “Lunar Park” is simply about Bret Easton Ellis. Narcissism and self-destruction suit this author: Mr. Ellis’s celebrity, of the love-to-hate variety, requires that he slime himself before he can speak credibly.

The novel begins with a long, compelling recap of Ellis’s career so far – pure gossip, which is perhaps what Mr. Ellis should have been doing for some time. When he recalls, of the doomed relationship he now resumes, that “we could be seen at an Elton John AIDS benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, we were photographed at a Hampton’s Polo match, we were interviewed by the Entertainment Tonight on the red carpet,” his tone rushes, dismissively, through a terrain Mr. Ellis has mastered.

His air-conditioned cynicism occasionally goes belly-up – “Haven’t we outgrown all this tired irony?” he foolishly asks the fictional Jay McInerney – and it never stings. It slops, puddles, and finally seeps, into the suburban lawn:

“It’s called disruptive technology.”
I could suddenly hear Victor barking from our yard.
“Mimi doesn’t want Hanson playing Doom anymore.”
“Why not?” someone asked.
“She says it’s a game the U.S. military uses to train soldiers.” A deep sigh.

The barking dog cuts through the conversation, introducing Mr. Ellis’s inevitable spike of danger – from his neighbor’s patio, he spies an intruder in his own upstairs window. Whether his flat worlds are built to accommodate his chilly fantasies, or whether his bloodthirsty plots arise in allegorical response to the soulless 1980s and their aftermath, the overall effect of his fiction is distraction – brought also by Xanax and vodka – simultaneously dissipated and urgent.

During a reconciliation with his wife, Mr. Ellis again thinks of the dog:

“How about you believe me … and …” – I turned around so we were facing each other and I stared at her pleadingly, my eyes sad and wistful – “just love me?”

There was a new silence in the kitchen. I glanced over at the dog as Jayne collapsed into me, hugging so tightly that I started to wheeze. Victor was staring at me. You bore me, it was thinking. You are a jerk, it was thinking.

Ellis the character does not exactly take himself seriously, but he is not apathetic, like Bateman. His commitment to his wife is sincere, but she cannot secure his wandering imagination, which he arrogantly privileges. His inventions, from Patrick Bateman to the Halloweenish ghosts of this book, claim a basic fictional right to invention.

In his autobiographical prologue, Mr. Ellis quotes Norman Mailer on “American Psycho”: “‘the first novel in years to take on deep, dark, Dostoyevskian themes – how one wishes this writer was without talent!” The seams of Mr. Ellis’s ambition are plain for picking, and the thing that protects him is indeed “talent” – a masculine facility that keeps the pages turning. Unwholesome phrases abound – “slouching toward me relentlessly,” for example – and Mr. Ellis indulges in armchair atmospherics – “It all seemed vaguely unreal to me.” Yet unreality wins, especially in the loping middle portion of the book, where Mr. Ellis moves from hints to real ghostliness with remarkable success.

“Success” is the word for this book, because it is written like a failure, crammed with special effects, self-consciousness, and sociological commonplaces, and because the author has made himself his own greatest risk. The fictional Ellis is working on a “pornographic thriller”; “Lunar Park” is better labeled a miraculous hangover.