Resurrector: American Psycho (the book)

When Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho came out, I was working in a bookstore in Baltimore. I was just out of art school. My priorities were social. My state of mind was tragic. My intellect was a work in progress. None of this mattered then. Then, the word wrong meant “right.” The books my friends and I liked were wrong. The music we liked was wrong. We thrived on our collective wrongness. I say this not as an excuse, but as a way to create setting. I wasn’t a person who read reviews. I didn’t know which works were unacclaimed. I still, more often than not, don’t know. I mean, not unless it affects my life directly, which American Psycho did. It wasn’t because I read it, which, at the time, I hadn’t. It was because it was controversial. This is an understatement. It was panned (and banned), and the local paper called the store to see if we carried the book. I’d been told to say we didn’t carry any of the author’s books. This was true. It wasn’t about censorship but, evidently, taste. The books, it seemed, just weren’t that good. I wouldn’t share with the paper that I gravitated toward the tasteless. I also wouldn’t share that I’d once read one of his other books and liked it. Instead, I’d align myself with the critics. And I’d rise, for the first time in my life, to that rarefied space of the virtuous.