Some authors strike gold consistently. Some find it, lose it, find it again. I would consider Bret Easton Ellis to be in that second group. His first three novels, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho, are all wonderfully strong. After that, it gets…messy. I’m not sure it’s possible if it could get any messier than 2023’s The Shards. It’s one of the worst books I’ve ever read, and FX has just released a teaser image for the upcoming series based on the novel.
What is The Shards?
The Shards hopefully won’t follow too deeply in the footsteps of the novel. That book would be better off called “The Sharts” for how shitty it is. That joke is low-hanging fruit, but I deserve to pick it for having read that dreck. It’s a confusing mess that seems to want to be multiple things. It only succeeds in being one thing, though, bad fan fiction of Ellis himself. The Shards is not the first novel by the author to be about a fictional version of himself, but it really makes me wish he would stop.
Bret writes the novel like a memoir of the late days of high school that never happened. This version of Bret is also an author, blurring the lines of fiction and reality. This Bret also listens to cool music, drives a cool car, has tons of sex, wants to track down a serial killer, has even more sex, talks about sex, has a cool girlfriend who he has sex with, and guy friends who he has sex with too! And he’s cool and edgy! I can assume the FX series won’t have as much sex.
Self-Indulgent. In Multiple Ways
It probably won’t have as much masturbation in it either because there’s a lot of that in here, too. Bret talks about jacking off so much that calling this novel a kind of masturbatory exercise has multiple different meanings. What seems like it’s going to be a story of going to high school with a serial killer around, turns into something truly stupid. The killer stuff largely takes a backseat to Bret just jacking off and having sex and wondering what sex would be like with other people. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the autofiction/meta-fiction element of it all. If Ellis were writing this as just a narrator or as another character, it would give it more artistic distance. But because he’s choosing to tell it from this meta perspective, it comes across as a desperate way to make himself seem like an edgy and sexy teenager.
Maybe all of that could actually make the series worth watching. It could give the story a chance to be recentered around the obsessive curiosity of the “new guy” with his magnetic aura, Robert Mallory. Or it could focus more on the Riders of the Afterlife cult and the serial killer named the “Trawler” who’s lurking about. All of those things would be a lot more fun than focusing on Bret rubbing one off. Again. And keeping a diary about it all. Because that’s a detail that added OH SO MUCH to the story.
The series is being developed by Ryan Murphy with Ellis attached as a producer. It’s set to premiere this summer on August 5th. Even if it’s only mildly entertaining, it’ll still be infinitely better than the book was. “The Sharts” sorry, The Shards will be viewable on both FX and Hulu.
