Because I'm a committed and conscientious student with a paper due tomorrow, I absolutely did not stay up until 2am last night reading Bret Easton Ellis' new book, Lunar Park, and thus have absolutely no grounds on which to recommend it wholeheartedly. And equally, I am absolutely not about to waste valuable paper writing time in constructing a half-arsed, Harry Potter style review based on the merest snippet of the novel - actually, worse, since I haven't even read the first 150 pages, or whatever it was, that the Guardian based its review of Goblet of Fire on.

With those disclaimers out of the way, I haven't read all of the book, only the first few chapters, but I'm really enjoying it. The reviews have been pretty uniformly terrible, but the good reviews I've read have drawn out the same things that I'm loving so much about the book. The first couple of chapters are just spot-on, pastiching Ellis' meteoric rise to literary stardom and equally meteoric crash back to earth, drugfucked and sardonic. (As an aside, I've never understood the term 'meteoric rise'. Maybe it's the scientist in me, but meteors are the light meteorites give off as they burn up in their descent through the atmosphere. The idea of a 'meteoric crash' makes way more sense to me, and certainly usefully describes the spectacular light given off by Bret Easton Ellis in that drugfucked haze in which he produced American Psycho.) The novel then turns into Stephen King at his dubious best - a genuinely creepy ghost story - but as I've only read a few pages of the novel after that key change, I'm not going to address it here.

Lunar Park has that characteristic Bret Easton Ellis 'voice' that I admire so much - you could tell it was him without looking at the cover (and, since it's somewhere between memoir and novel, without associating the Bret Easton Ellis that's a character in the book with the author of the book). He's a stylist of language - he writes like Hemingway, with that finely-honed sense of moment that produces breath-taking sentences without destroying the flow of the text. It's not like reading, say, Michael Ondaatje, who writes beautifully, so beautifully that you feel obligated to stop a moment to appreciate them. It's literary fiction, but it's still a page-turner.

Part of this, I think, is that sense of inevitable doom that comes along with every Bret Easton Ellis book, a sense that's fostered both by the excessive nature of his earlier books and also by the excessive nature of his media coverage - I call it 'like watching a train wreck', but only because the train wreck is one of my favourite and most overused metaphors. A better way of putting it might be this, which I found when looking for reviews of the novel the other day: 'Reading Bret Easton Ellis is like watching a brilliant dive into a very shallow pool: We admire the technique while awaiting the splatter.' The thing is, I think the pool only looks shallow - a sideshow illusion, if you will, constructed to scare and exhilarate the punters. Will there be splatter? The potential for splatter is what keeps us coming back, but we secretly know it's never coming. We just like the thrills.

It occurs to me that I would really love to be in charge of a book club, so that I could tell everyone what to read. I'd pick all my favourite and most disturbing books.

Y'all can expect the next breathless fangirl book review when I actually finish reading the novel.

PS - I deleted three spam comments from this post only a couple of hours after I first wrote it. This is exciting, since I normally only get one spam comment at a time. How pathetic, to be excited about spam comments. You take what you can, I guess.