American Psycho is Bret Easton Ellis's third novel, released in 1991. The first-person narrator is a Wall Street investment banker named Patrick Bateman, who either is or imagines himself to be a prolific serial killer. Like other works which critique and lampoon 1980s "yuppie" culture, such as Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (1984) and Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), American Psycho endeavors to peel away the glittering surfaces of the late-1980s Wall Street boom in order to examine its seedy and amoral underbelly. Ellis in fact borrows the name of Patrick's firm—Pierce & Pierce—from Wolfe's book. Patrick's philosophical and political outlook also strongly resembles that of Gordon Gekko, the antagonist of Stone's film, whose famous assertion, "Greed is good," reflects the ideological status quo of Reagan-era Wall Street.
The novel's literary influences include nineteenth-century Gothic tales like The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as Dante's Inferno, Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, and Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil. Ellis's desire to shock, offend, and occasionally bore his audience also reflects the artistic legacy of Andy Warhol, whose funeral took place the same day that the novel opens, and early twentieth-century surrealists like Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel.
The chapters in the second half of American Psycho depicting violence, rape, and mutilation against women were so controversial that Simon & Schuster, the publisher that gave Ellis a $300,000 advance for the novel, refused to publish it. Released instead by Vintage Books, the novel was panned in nearly every major publication and met with boycott campaigns organized by the National Organization for Women and feminist activists like Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett, who argued that American Psycho promoted sexual violence against women. The horrific, gratuitous renderings of brutality against women seem in part to stem from Patrick's pornographic, voyeuristic fascination with capturing surface-level details—what porn scholars like Linda Williams have called "the frenzy of the visible"—as well as his inability to transcend or understand them.
Although the book's graphic content provoked outrage and disgust upon its release, it has since been recuperated by certain academics and critics for its transgressive and postmodern qualities. Mary Harron's 2000 film adaptation, adapted by Harron and Guinevere Turner, reinvents the novel as a satirical black comedy, and was hailed by The New York Times as a "mean and lean horror comedy classic." The character Patrick Bateman has himself become something of a cult figure in popular culture, becoming synonymous with a certain kind of entitled, affluent, white male sociopath. Bateman also appears briefly in Ellis's 2004 novel Lunar Park.
