Is it as gutwrenchingly violent as its controversy makes it out to be?

Is it as gutwrenchingly violent as its controversy makes it out to be?

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it's been a while, but i remember he inserts a tube in some woman's anus and let's a rat go inside.
nice chap.
also, rolling

They were only one or two parts that made me uncomfortable.

The torture scenes are quite gruesome.

I will admit that I saw the movie and thought the violence was really nothing and then was very surprised by how graphic the book was. there were a few pages I admit to sort of skimming because they were just descriptions of atrocity after atrocity. I suppose that's sort of the point, but I do think the effect could have been achieved in a slightly more subtle way. fantastic book though. the chapter where it details his summer in the Hamptons is one of my favorite few pages of everything ever

There's some fucked up parts that still make me cringe at the thought of them. As mentions there's one scene where he inserts a tube into a (living) woman's vagina and releases a rat into the tube. He staples one woman to the floor, rips out her tongue and then fucks her mouth as she dies. There was also one scene where he describes himself inserting a knife point into a homeless person's eye ball and talks about the blood filling his pupils. All in all the book is pure shock value and not much else, but it's short enough to be worth the read, in my opinion.

why don't you fucking read it and find out

He kills a kid in a zoo just cause. And this thinking behind it is fucked up.

The best parts are the banter between Pat Bateman and his colleagues.
There’s a scene where they want to reserve a table somewhere and the banter over the phone with 4-5 different people. It gets to midnight and they still didn’t get a table. I nearly died reading that.

is it worth reading even though I've seen the movie many times?

it really is. I listened to the audiobook while I had a concussion and it made me feel sick.

I think the worst part for me was and a part where he describes how he connected a car battery to the corpse of a girl's nipples, and the corpse has turned black and charred as a result from this. Her breasts' fat has exploded and the walls have burned fat on them

it makes me feel uneasy typing this out

After years of posting on Veeky Forums, you'd think you'd be desensitized to offensive material, but this still made me feel pretty uneasy.

It is extremely violent. The movie toned it down so much. I'd say the only other book that really compares is Blood Meridian, and I think American Psycho is more descriptive.

If you like the movie, you'll like the book. It's all first person narration by Patrick Bateman, and some of it is fucking hilarious.

Some people get bored by his long rambling monologues about clothes or Phil Collins, but honestly it's not as bad as some people say it is, and if you read it with Christian Bale's voice in your head, it's pretty funny sometimes.

Surprisingly yes. It’s a bizarre mixture of disgusting violence with yuppie satire. It’s both more violent and funny than the movie. Book Bateman is autistic

Oh yeah

definitely
I needed a break from the book after some chapters. It's horrible and a good book

The book is a comedy. Even the violent depictions of murder are so over the top and grotesque that you really can't take them at face value.
Normies who haven't been exposed to anything other than Hollywood and Netflix are outraged by all kinds of things, but that's just because they don't like fiction being uncomfortable.
The closest it came to actually being horrifying was probably the scene in which Bateman stabs a random womans child in a mall, hides, then, when its mother notices that it's bleeding out comes up to her pretending to be a doctor and holds it in his arms as it dies, while she stands next to him, at first grateful and hopeful, then increasingly panicking as he does absolutely nothing.

Only part I skipped was the rat scene, everything else was disturbing but not that much, and some of it was also kind of shittily written (killing the faggot, for example, seemed like something from a black comedy)

That was a good chapter.

It is a black comedy.

>all these people talking about being disturbed by the gore scenes and skipping chapters because they couldn't deal with them emotionally
I just thought it was funny in an absurd kind of way. Should I be worried?

Pre-CCTV fiction. I kept thinking how all the stuff he was doing would be caught on camera, run through face recognition software and have him identified in less than 24 hours if it was set today. The book was written just after the 70s and 80s which were the peak years regarding numbers of active serial killers and media interest in them. Made it all feel somewhat dated, but the yuppie satire is excellent

It's only as violent as your most morbid intrusive thoughts, but the head trip is in reading it back to yourself articulated on the page before you.
It's thoroughly disgusting, yes.
Took me around a year to get through it with frequent starts and stops and re-reading the more bearable sections over again, but I didn't skip anything.
It's the kind of thing you read in public and have to put down out sheer revulsion for the thoughts in your own head.

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The whole thing about American Psycho is anyone could have caught Bateman, but everyone was so obsessed with themselves that they just didn't pay attention. It's also heavily implied that everyone was a murder in this book, they were all doing the exact same shit Bateman was doing.

That's what I like about the book. Every character falls into two categories: Self absorbed business man, and dumb vapid whore, and every character looks and behaves the exact same way.

Honestly it's a genius book. The more I think about it, the more I love it.

Even more genius: Bateman is desperate to be caught.
By the end of the book he can't go anywhere without breaking down sobbing completely distraught over the lack of recourse for his evil. He confesses his crimes ubiquitously throughout the book and just wants someone to fucking LISTEN to him long enough to institute reprehension for his actions.
But nobody is listening, and he continues in his hellish nightmare of primeval bloodshed wanting nothing more than to inflict his suffering on everyone around him.

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>>It's the kind of thing you read in public and have to put down out sheer revulsion for the thoughts in your own head.
What did it make you think about?

It came off as a bit pretentious, but by the end it really made sense why BEE started off American Psycho with the 'abandon all hope, ye who enter here' graffiti.

vacuous post from a know-nothing

Habitually imagining myself as Bateman and the satisfaction / disgust that his crimes would fill me with. Wondering the extent of morbid dehumanization people are capable of without consequences for who would cross them.
I'm thinking more about the images that play in your mind (in the presence of other people) as Bateman ravishes the dismembered remains of his victims.

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bret easton ellis sucks. just watch the movie, its better than the book.

this is what an idiots post looks like

The part where he talks about holding a lighter up to a womans eyeball until one pops and the other glosses over sticks with me.

My favorite is the chapter where he just casually describes having a mental breakdown and acting crazy in Manhattan.

The funny thing is, that's the only murder he regrets or feels bad about. simply because by killing a child it doesn't give him the satisfaction of ending a persons successful life or career.

i knew i'd get someone

and btw, im not trolling, the book sucks and bret easton ellis will be forgotten in 50 years

Not much if you've read Naked Lunch, but still pretty awful. Also, if you do finish it, make sure to rea Wallace's essay on the brat pack afterword

Yes, but it's still a damn good read. I wasn't bothered by the gore but his constant rambles about pop culture stuff and brands is annoying.

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it's in a zoo, not a mall.

While we're on about BEE and adaptations, what does Veeky Forums think about Rules of Attraction? Sean Bateman isn't nearly as violent, but reading his POV chapters always felt unnerving

You don't like Huey Lewis and the News?
Their early work was a little too 'new-wave' for my taste, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own - both commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humour. In '87, Huey released this, Fore, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is 'Hip To Be Square', a song so catchy most people probably don't listen to the lyrics - but they should! Because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it's also a personal statement about the band itself!

book is better than the movie but the book still sucks, and i agree about him being forgotten

I still remember that scene where Bates brings a kid over to a trashcan while visiting the zoo, stabs the ever-loving shit out of him, then pretends to be a doctor to draw attention to the body and horrify the mother, and kills the kid in front of everyone. I have 8 younger siblings, shit rattled me and has stuck with me since.

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>ate younger siblings
damn that's pretty hardcore
did ur absorb their power?
ur the real american psycho

>abloo bloo, look how I suffer
>n-no one listens to me

All that, for this? Read Sade instead.

Why is every item of clothing described as wool? You'd think it takes place in fucking Wales with how much wool everyone's wearing

Because fine men's clothing is generally made of wool (suits and overcoats). Moreover, it can be quite cold in New York City.