‘The Shards’ 
By Bret Easton Ellis 
Knopf, 608 pages

“The Shards” is a pulp movie of a book and a riposte to the pieties of style and subject that is de rigueur in fiction these days. It is lurid, flirts with the pornographic, is by turns melodramatic and angsty, and is as interested in nuance as a hammer. It is long and repetitive, but good luck putting it down. It is a novel about Los Angeles, the early 1980s, the roiling emotions and hormones of high school, and serial killers. It is Bret Easton Ellis’s first in 13 years. It’s a doozy.

Readers will know Mr. Ellis as a Brat Pack alum, one of a coterie who learned a cool and straightforward approach from Raymond Carver and Anne Beattie. His first novel, “Less Than Zero,” appeared when he was 21 and still a student at Bennington. It features lots of drugs, lots of sex, and lots of alienation. Its reviewer in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, called it “one of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time.”

Mr. Ellis cites Joan Didion and the film “American Gigolo” as influences for “Less Than Zero,” and they still abide in his work. From Didion he gleaned a flatness of style and a reporter’s eye for cultural flotsam; California chill rendered into prose. “Gigolo” marked his interest in crime and the intersection of lust and murder. In the New Yorker, Roger Angell opined that the film presented a “kind of sex” that reminded him of Penthouse. 

Mr. Ellis is best known for “American Psycho,” which is (unreliably) narrated by an investment banker turned serial killer who commits murders of escalating gruesomeness. Transgressive and postmodern in its attention to surface and disdain for meaning, the book was dropped by its initial publisher, still faces restricted sales in some parts of the world, and was made into a movie and musical. Four of Easton’s books have made it to Hollywood.

Now comes “The Shards,” which announces itself as “novel” and  “entirely a work of fiction” yet wears the clothes of autobiography. Its 17-year-old protagonist is “Bret,” who like the author grew up in LA, went to Buckley high school, and then on to Bennington and literary stardom. He’s rich but not the richest, he’s cool but not the coolest, and he reads John Updike for class, Didion to learn how to write, and Stephen King for fun. He’s obsessed with the movies. 

“The Shards” is a bildungsroman, or a coming of age story.  Everyone drives everywhere (Bret’s Mercedes is among the lesser vehicles of the high school parking lot) and ingests a prodigious amount of drugs, mostly cocaine and Quaaludes. There is relationship drama aplenty, and so much teenage angst the reader is likely to be cured of nostalgia for homeroom and homecoming. Everyone in the novel is beautiful and clueless in equal measure.

The book tracks the implosion of a group of friends during their senior year of high school. Some of the reasons for this shattering are maudlin — being an almost-adult is never easy — and some are macabre. Gruesome murders and Los Angeles’s indigenous glamor and depravity go in the latter category. No spoilers, but Mr. Ellis is a West Coast chronicler of what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk,” surfacing here under the “Hollywood” sign.      

The clutch of friends at the heart of Mr. Ellis’s tale are, to an extent unimaginable from the vantage point of 2023, free. Their parents are absent or stoned, they are unencumbered by social media or iPhones, the weather is always good, and they are, in today’s parlance, “privileged.” They graduate the year MTV launched.  

The fast times at Buckley high darken into something sinister with the appearance of the Trawler, a serial killer who hunts Los Angeles in the fall of Bret’s senior year. A new boy, Robert Mallory, appears somehow linked to the murders, which shatter the school idyll. Mr. Ellis is adroit at interweaving teenage drama — break ups, secrets, friendships forming and splitting — with life-and-death stakes, as if to say that every high school is its own crime scene.

“The Shards” is written in a retrospective key, which sounds a note of foreboding that coexists with a thriller’s suspense. It is a story of paradise lost, but its nostalgia is tempered by the knowledge that even the good old days were as ragged as a bitten down fingernail. Bret, like Mr. Ellis, is gay, and his sexual awakening features not only ecstasy but exploitation by adults. Bret and his friends want to be grownups because the joy of being young has already curdled.

Part of what makes “The Shards” so readable is that Mr. Ellis’s style is a house divided. Reflecting on one of his friends, Bret muses, “I wanted to be where Susan Reynolds was. And I wanted to write like this as well: numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation, numbness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy.” If Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff urges “give me life,” then Mr. Ellis’s Bret pushes for more Valium. The least cool thing is to try too hard.

There is, however, another side of Mr. Ellis’s literary personality that rebels against this anesthetic attitude. “The Shards” has a fast pulse, propelled by horror and horniness. It can read like a bodice — or gym shorts — ripper, and there are buckets of blood. The climactic scene could have been written by Quentin Tarantino. The sunshine makes everyone glow. The windows are always down, the mixtapes are on high volume, and there is a scream howling around the bend.