Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis

This was a hard book for me to continue reading. It starts out with a precis of Ellis's life and work, so far, but with fictional details. Then it moves into a fictional now, still with Bret Easton Ellis as the narrator and main character. Finally, it becomes elegiac in the last pages.

Ellis calls this book his Stephen King book, and there is much about the book that fits that description. In some ways, it's as if you shuffled a deck of cards, containing characters from Bret Easton Ellis books with cards containing Stephen King circumstances and plotting. So, we have a disaffected, drinking, drugging Bret and family (he has given himself a movie-star wife and two children in the book) confronted by monsters, slime, and hauntings.

I almost stopped reading about a hundred pages in--I just can't find that much to like about the persona of Bret Easton Ellis, but then I re-read the Meghan O'Rourke review in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2124806/) that caused me to pick the book up to begin with. And I clicked around on the web, reading interviews and reviews, and then I decided to push on through. I guess the book was worth reading, but I think the best of the book is quoted in O'Rourke's review. Maybe I had to slog through the horror story to find the loveliness that resides in those final pages. Each reader will have to decide this one alone.