Would American Psycho be published today? How shocking books have changed with their readers
Do disturbing novels reflect an extreme reality or are they just titillation? Hanya Yanagihara, Leïla Slimani and others on why they set out to shock us
Bret Easton Ellis received 13 death threats before American Psycho was even published. He had to sign a declaration saying he had read them all. That way, if somebody did murder him, his parents couldn’t sue the publisher. This was in 1991. “I would not have the impulse to write that book again,” Ellis says now, during a visit to the Guardian. “It came from that time and place … And does anyone remember that there was no one there for me at all? I had to pretty much go through a trial by fire on my own.”
Ellis’s publisher, Vintage, had only taken on the book because its original publisher, Simon & Schuster, withdrew at the last minute. There had been what they called “aesthetic differences over what critics had termed its violent and women-hating content”. The National Organisation for Women called for a boycott of the book, and every other book from the same publisher. “This is not art,” said Tammy Bruce, president of NOW’s LA chapter. “Mr Ellis is a confused, sick young man with a deep hatred of women who will do anything for a fast buck.”