By all means, 'American Psycho' by Brett Easton Ellis should not have scared me as badly as it did.
The book itself is not scary in a "the call is coming from inside the house!" kind of way. It's more graphic and gory than macabre or psychological, and yet when I read this book back in my early 20s I immediately had to throw it in the trash can (not even the recycling!) and take out the trash and spend the night at a friend's house. I feel silly even calling this a scary book, and yet here we are.
I think what happened is this: while I'm not as much of a fan of serial killer media as my brother is or my friend Nicole is, I can appreciate a good psychological mind-fuck. "Silence of the Lambs" is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I really enjoyed the first season of "The Following." But generally speaking, I'm not into the genre known as "thrillers," or mysteries, or who-done-its. I especially don't like when the victims are all young women -- which I was at the time I read this book; and I didn't like how Patrick Bateman was a normal-seeming white dude in a suit -- which is what I worked around at the time, too. I remember reading a certain nausea-inducing scene in the book right before my then-boss sent me to stand in line at the bank, in Midtown Manhattan, where I swore I was surrounded by Patrick Batemans.
So maybe that's it: I'm sure 'American Psycho' is exactly the hard-core parody of 1980s American white Wall Street culture that many claim it is, but I wouldn't know because I've blocked out a huge chunk of some of the books more disturbing scenes and refuse to read it again. I guess it's not for single young women still living alone who work among the be-suited young men of Midtown Manhattan to read. As I'll be discussing in future posts, sometimes things are scary purely because of the context in which they are absorbed.
What scares you?
No comments:
Post a Comment