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American Psycho is another of the books I read when I was a teenager who chose books on the basis of their shock-value. I bought my copy when I was 16 or 17. I’m sure my first read-through was rather shallow and uninformative, but I have very fond memories of reading it again after university. Mostly I read it sitting in Swansea’s Castle Square, which is a lovely place to enjoy your lunch in the summer.

Over the course of American Psycho, Patrick Bateman describes his life as an investment banker and serial killer. Bateman’s murderous impulses are simply an extension of his other impulses: He murders because he can, much as he buys expensive things and eats at expensive restaurants. Written in 1991, as the boom of the late 80′s turned into the recession of the early 90′s, Ellis’s depiction of Bateman and the people around him is a needle sharp satire of yuppie culture and capitilistic excess. It’s peculiarly relevent these days, for obvious reasons.

It was a controversial novel at the time, mostly because of its extremely graphic scenes of murder, sex and the combination of both. While Bateman murders a variety of people, the scenes that describe his rape and slaughter of young women are by far the most lurid and detailed. It seems obvious to me that this is intentional and consistent with the larger goals of the novel, but it does open the novel and author up to charges of misogyny. I’ve never found fictional descriptions or depictions of violence to be all that disturbing – after all, they’re not real – but I can understand that some readers might prefer not to expose themselves to this kind of thing.

The least interesting question about the novel is whether Bateman is really a “fucking evil psychopath” or if he’s just a twisted fantasist. It’s possible to make the argument either way, but Ellis has left the question intentionally ambiguous, which is the real point. As the novel’s epigraphic quotation from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, says: “such persons as the composer of these Notes not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist, considering the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.”

American Psycho is a surprisingly rich novel and Bateman a surprisingly complex character. It’s hard not to pity him, in spite of his reprehensible behaviour. It’s revealed in one key passage that Bateman doesn’t need to work – his father owns the company he works for and he doesn’t need to work. He only works because he desperately wants to fit in. There are some surprisingly touching scenes where it becomes clear that Bateman is utterly miserable.

If you want to read something shocking then it’ll do, but there’s much more to the novel that that. It’s a genuinely inventive and original work.