The Shards

The highly anticipated new book from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms follows a group of wealthy high school classmates in Los Angeles while a serial murderer targets different parts of the city.

The gripping tale of the loss of innocence and the dangerous transition from childhood to adulthood found in Bret Easton Ellis's brilliant new book is set in a vividly imagined Los Angeles in 1981, when a serial murderer starts picking up kids all around the city.

Bret, 17, is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new kid with an enigmatic history shows there. Even as Robert Mallory gets to know Bret and his friends, he keeps his identity a secret from them despite being intelligent, attractive, charming, and charming. The only thing that preoccupies Bret more than his obsession with Mallory is The Trawler, a fugitive serial killer who seems to be getting closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them with grotesque threats and horrifying, remarkably localized acts of violence. The coincidences are remarkable, but they are also filtered through the creative imagination of a youngster who is poised to become one of the most exciting literary talents of his generation due to his ability to weave stories out of the threads of his own life. Is he able to trust his buddies, or his own thoughts, to understand the danger they seem to be in? A victim of both external and internal pressures, as well as unhealthful obsessions, he becomes irrationally suspicious and withdraws from others as The Trawler and Robert Mallory's relationship rapidly approaches a breaking point.

The Shards is a captivating blend of truth and fiction, the real and the imagined, that masterfully examines the emotional fabric of Bret's existence at 17—sex and jealousy, infatuation and deadly rage—against the extremely vivid and nostalgic background of pre-Less Than Zero LA. Intriguing, cunning, tense, profoundly eerie, and often darkly humorous, The Shards is Ellis at his most distinctive.