Resumo de Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis

The first chapter of Lunar Park offers the reader an autobiographical account of Ellis?s career up until the publicity tour of Glamorama (1999) and film release of American Psycho (1991). At this point Bret is a physical and mental wreck, a walking cauldron of Class-A, prescription drugs, and alcohol (during one book reading he begins to feel his front tooth falling out), and he seeks help from the only character who still regards him with any tenderness, the fictional film star Jayne Dennis. Dennis is also the mother of his child Robby, a son whom he previously denied any connection with, preferring to gift the responsibility of fatherhood to Keanu Reeves. Suffice to say, when we move into the novel?s real time (unusually for Ellis narrated in the past tense), Bret is living in a house filled with much resentment and hostility. This uncomfortable situation is further aggravated by the fact that Bret begins using again, is chasing a graduate student called Aimee Light, despite being married for only four months - this is often his excuse - and harbours bizarre suspicions as to the powers, thoughts, and obstructive actions of the family dog, Victor.

The story proper begins with a Halloween party at Bret?s house; he passes out halfway after taking coke and Xanax, but not before he sees an unknown guest dressed as Patrick Bateman, the infamous serial killer of American Psycho, and hears peculiar scratching noises coming from his daughter?s bedroom. After the party furniture is rearranged in the house and a number of stubborn, ashy footprints appear on a beige rug. The next day Bret pursues Aimee, who is writing her dissertation: Destination Nowhere, on his work. Before he meets and fondles her a student called Clayton interrupts him and asks that he signs a copy of Less Than Zero (1985), his first novel. Later he sees Aimee driving a man through town in her BMW and she leans over to kiss him in the passenger-seat; this incites a series of manic phone-calls to Aimee?s cell. He makes a connection between Clayton and a loitering cream-coloured Mercedes SL 450, distinguishable by the fact that it is the exact same model of car his father gave him when he was younger.

After the detective Donald Kimball visits Bret at his home to tell him about a sequence of recent murders mimicking those of Patrick Bateman, Bret becomes convinced that Clayton is the man responsible. He does not warn Kimball, however, because he fears something untoward will be uncovered in his relationship with Aimee Light, last seen (he thinks) with Clayton, and now a missing person. While this subplot progresses there are other peculiar events occurring in his neighbourhood: local boys of Robby?s age (11) are disappearing, no bodies, contact, demands, or evidence forthcoming, and his house seems to be undergoing a mutation, becoming more and more like the house in which he grew up; the white painted exterior peels away to reveal a familiar salmon-pink stucco, curtains appear where there were none, etc. Furthermore, in an incident that seriously undermines his role as father and husband, and sanity, he drags the children out of the house one night, gun in hand, because he thinks he sees a shadowy intruder. All these events place a great deal of strain on Bret, he drinks heavily, he is forced to sleep in the guest room, and the couples counselling he attends with his wife causes him to break down in tears. He also suspects that Clayton has some link to his father?s death, though this is chronologically impossible.

When Jayne flies to Toronto for the re-shooting of her film, leaving Bret with the children, they are subjected to a terrifying ordeal involving a toy-bird and a strange, hairy, three-foot monster. Bret moves the children out of the house and hires a demonologist to investigate and fumigate. After fumigation, necessary because the souls of the dead can only inhabit living beings, he is attacked by the toy-bird, which invades the body of Victor andalmost tears off his leg. Escaping the house he crashes the car; he is seemingly rammed by the cream-coloured Mercedes SL 450 but no-one else witnesses this, and he is hospitalised, where finally he learns that Robby has disappeared. Jayne divorces him after the accident.

There are too many supposedly significant details and oddities of plot to summarise succinctly, but the overall effect, and intent of Lunar Park is one that questions the relationship between fathers and sons. Patrick Bateman revisits him because he is a fictional character that Ellis supposedly bases on his father; Bret lives in ?Elsinore Lane? near to ?Fortinbras Mall?, Aimee is murdered in ?Orsic (sic) Hotel? and his father dies on ?Claudius Lane?; these clumsy references to the bard should remind the reader of similarities between Bret and Hamlet, both visited by the ghost of their dead father. There are also echoes of Stephen King (a professed favourite apparently) and Edgar Allen Poe, thinking particularly of the demonic bird, the Terby, an ever-present threat to their domestic happiness. It is a novel, however, that seems ill-conceived, a hotch-potch of genre, at times trashy horror, sentimental melodrama, elegiac, comic, apathetic drug fiction, a mix that doesn?t gel. Ellis seems to have lost that sharp, confident voice which so skilfully dissected the concerns of young Americans, and his middle-aged fiction is confused.

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