NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A novel of sensational literary and psychological suspense from
the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged
high school friends in a vibrantly fictionalized 1980s Los Angeles as a serial killer strikes
across the city A thrilling page turner from Ellis who revisits the world that made him a
literary star with a stylish scary new story that doesn't disappoint.” –Town & Country Bret
Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence and the perilous
passage from adolescence into adulthood set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981
as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city. Seventeen-year-old Bret is a
senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past.
Robert Mallory is bright handsome charismatic and shielding a secret from Bret and his
friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory
is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler a serial killer
on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends taunting them—and
Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific sharply local acts of violence. The
coincidences are uncanny but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager
whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him
one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or
his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his
own innate desires buffeted by unhealthy fixations he spirals into paranoia and isolation as
the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.
Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A. The Shards
is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction the real and the imagined that brilliantly
explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at seventeen—sex and jealousy obsession and
murderous rage. Gripping sly suspenseful deeply haunting and often darkly funny The Shards
is Ellis at his inimitable best.
