For better or worse, Bret Easton Ellis likes being the villain. For better – with American Psycho the certified classic satire of vulture capitalists that can still shock the most unshockable readers. Or worse – with 2019’s White, a bitter non-fiction rant against liberals, younger generations, Hollywood, social media, etc. In the lockdown months of 2020 he started a new novel, his first since 2010’s Imperial Bedrooms. He’d since become a podcaster, a pundit, and an infamous tweeter, seemingly content to let his literary reputation be, for better or worse.

The Shards is a return to his debut novel Less Than Zero, and the early ’80s LA high school scene of cool privileged kids. Much like 2006’s Lunar Park, the narrator is Ellis himself, controversial author and all around unlikable guy. Which underneath it all is his genius – that fearlessness in showing his worst sides, not just those we might relate to but what we recoil from, while still maintaining a certain charm. That was the essence of Patrick Bateman, and so too the Bret Ellis of Lunar Park, absurdly portrayed as a family man living in a haunted house. Despite its farcical horror elements, that book was every bit as transcendently fun as American Psycho. Still I approached The Shards apprehensively, given its well worn setting, and whiff of some desperation.

Essentially the plot is that of ’90s horror film Scream – a serial killer invades a seemingly perfect high school world. Though there seems to be a clear suspect, the mystery of his identity nudges the plot along. As usual there are deeper themes, of teenage alienation and young Bret’s fluid sexuality. He’s dating one of the most popular girls in school, even as he desires and has affairs with other boys. That one of those boys ends up dead, presumably a victim of the serial killer, is significant. Not that we suspect Bret, directed as we are to the new kid Robert Mallory. Still Bret finds himself at the center of a series of suspicious events, followed and spied on as he’s trying to follow Mallory. He also has an affair with his girlfriend’s father, a sleazy Hollywood producer, which is inessential to the plot but so in Ellis’s stylistic wheelhouse that it works. The Shards feels like an author regaining his footing, taking us through some familiar setpieces – kids with sports cars sniffing coke, ’80s music mixtapes, predatory sex. Still his instincts as a writer are so iconoclastic that he transcends even his own edgy traditions. That’s what keeps this book moving, even if it is too long.

I’d argue The Shards would be a stronger book at half its length. Not that it ever got dull so much as repetitive, lost in the trappings of its setting. These rich kids feel at times like just caricatures. Which works just fine, for the dreamy style of the book and the isolation of its narrator. But that artistic choice can’t sustain 608 pages of school days and parties and conversations. We’re asked to care about the dramatic breakup of the main couple, but we don’t, nor do we believe disaffected Bret really does either. Which brings up this element of the unreliable narrator, since current day Bret is remembering these events, clouded by nostalgia and self-preservation. Whether we can believe him becomes a subtle key to the narrative, the resolution of which is also cloudy. But rightly and effectively so, thereby not undermining the autofictional element. Narrator Bret is a bit too vain, and perhaps self-deluded, to give us the whole picture, so it’s up to the reader to solve the book’s mysteries.

Of course I won’t spoil the ending, other than to say a few final scenes are quite chilling. And despite my complaints about the length, they made me want to read it again. I’m grateful to have Bret Easton Ellis back in the world of novels, where his shit stirring personality can be employed for more artistic ends than political punditry. I still don’t agree with his generational complaints, replete as they are with hypocrisies. Many times he’s argued, including in The Shards, that no generation was more free than young Generation X. Wouldn’t subsequent ones then have a right to be discontent? Nor does “free” seem the right word to describe the world of The Shards, where the bratty cool kids live under the laws of social status, full of insecurities. So as usual under the surface level villainy, Ellis remains a gifted novelist, transgressive as ever. The Shards is in the top tier of his work.