Lunar Park (Bret Easton Ellis, Knopf, 2006)
Bret Easton Ellis writing a horror novel is weird in itself. That it’s at the same time a postmodern rumination on his own life, featuring a first-person narrator with the same name and at least partially the same life as the author makes it stranger, but surprisingly, Lunar Park works quite well, both as postmodern novel and as horror.
The book’s Bret Easton Ellis has enjoyed a career as a celebrated novelist, but has also royally fucked up his life with drugs and meaningless relationships. One such relationship resulted in a child, and years later, he’s married the child’s mother to try to have a more normal life. Since, in the book’s world, the large cities are unlivable due to incessant terrorist attacks, Ellis and his new family relocate to the suburbs of New York City, where he tries to stay off drugs, and to connect with his sullen teenage son and his wife’s younger daughter by another man. Everyone’s on a cocktail of mood-altering drugs, even the six-year-old, and life in the suburbs is not really what Ellis is used to.
It starts getting strange and horrible, in a fashion very typical of Ellis, when things from his past seem to invade his present. Someone keeps showing up driving a car identical to that of his late father, the paint of his house, which is new and has never been painted another color, peels off to reveal the color of his father’s house, and so on. Add to this a classic demonic children’s toy, a serial killer reenacting murders from “American Psycho“, and boys his son’s age disappearing randomly from the neighbourhood, and some sort of vague form stalking the forest behind his house, and you have a very personal and postmodern horror novel. Essentially, Ellis is haunted by his past and the relationship with his father, but along the way, the book echoes both Stephen King and John Carpenter’s “The Thing”.
The ending is typical Ellis too, where things sort of resolve, but not in any neat and tidy way, and many parts of the story are left open to interpretation. I’m a longtime fan of Ellis, and this book is up there with his best, especially if you’re a horror fan too.