The 1980s in Southern California were a completely different world. Left to themselves by neglectful parents, drugs, sex, and rock and roll ruled Bret Ellis and his friends’ world. And in the summer of 1981, a new playmate appears who threatens to destroy their social world. What’s more, a serial killer is stalking Southern California, the danger seeming to swirl around Bret and the new boy, Robert Mallory. Bret is determined to protect his friends, but they don’t see the danger he does. Not all of them will make it out of 1981 alive, and the rest will be forever changed by tragedy. See their world break in The Shards from Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho.
[Warning: My review of The Shards contains some spoilers!]
Too much free time, too much money, too much everything
Bret Ellis and his friends belong to the privileged class. Their parents are all super rich and don’t want to actually deal with the children they’ve birthed, so they give them all the money they want and leave the kids to themselves while they (the parents) do their own thing. These kids have unlimited funds, uncontrolled access to drugs, and no supervision. It’s no real surprise that every one of them is unhappy and in danger of going off the rails. Still, there’s an order to their world. Bret feels completely disconnected from everyone around him, but he knows the part he’s supposed to play: moody writer and loving boyfriend. He only actually likes one of these roles. It takes multiple drugs to get him up and performing the other one. Luckily, no one notices because they all are taking multiple drugs to get through their days. If anything, Bret’s a lightweight.
Then things change. In 1981, girls in SoCal start to go missing. Eventually their bodies show up horribly “arranged”. The killer is named The Trawler, and Bret is in awe of him. Not in a “I want to be like that” kind of way, but in a “this is terrifying” kind of way. To his complete shock, no one around him seems to even be aware of what’s going on; they sure aren’t worried about the Trawler, even if he’s targeting young girls their age from their area. Everyone is much more interested in the new kid, Robert Mallory, and how his presence is upsetting the established social hierarchy.
Bret doesn’t like Mallory any more than he likes the Trawler. With his parents out of the country (for months- who leaves a 17-year-old for months?), he’s all alone trying to deal with the fear of a serial killer, a string of local break-ins, the charming new addition to his friend group, his own teenage depression, and his sexuality. It’s a lot for anyone to deal with, but especially for an unsupported teenager. As more and more time passes, Bret begins to lose his tenacious grip on his anxiety, and it becomes flat-out fear. He knows that Mallory is dangerous; why won’t anyone listen to him? If only they had, maybe the events of that fall could have been avoided.
Where are the parents?
Okay, that line’s become a cliché, but I mean where are the parents?!? Pretty much everything that happens in The Shards could have been avoided if even one of those kids had even halfway decent parents. Instead, their parents are just as drunk, just as high, and just as sex-crazed as all the teenagers. And they have just as much common sense. It’s absolutely crazy! If that’s really what life was like in the 80s for SoCal kids, I can understand why they’re all so messed up. I mean, none of them even tries to get through the day sober; they start the day off with drugs and keep them coming, mixing uppers and downers to try and achieve a state of “nothingness” that they all crave. It’s sad and insane to me that people actually lived like that. I don’t even know if it’s exaggerated or not because I spent literally the entire book trying to decide if it was based on real events or not (spoiler alert: the last page, after the story ends, informs you that while the author is a real character in the story, no one else is, and any similarities to people living or dead are coincidental, blah, blah, blah). I was pretty sure it had to be by the end, but only because something is admitted at the very end that the author never would have shared if it was real. All that to say, if his early years were really spent like that, or if anyone else’s were, I feel awful for them and wish them luck while asking, “Where are your parents?”
A lot of foreshadowing in The Shards
The Shards is a long book, over 600 pages, although my copy had tissue paper thin pages; it wasn’t too thick. However, it could probably have easily been cut close to half just by taking out all the author’s repeated references to “the events of 1981”, “what happened in the fall of 1981” and “the tragedy of that fall”. Ellis spends so much time reminding us that terrible things are going to happen that you almost zone out on some of the terrible things that are actually happening. It’s also very easy to realize what’s going to happen before it ever does because there’s so much foreshadowing that you know that there are only certain ways that things can work out. There was one small twist at the end I didn’t really see coming; to be honest, I thought it was going to be a different twist that would have been more surprising and upsetting, I think, that really, really made you feel bad for certain characters. But otherwise, I knew everything that was going to happen before it did because it had to happen that way. Ellis is going for an unreliable narrator, which makes some of the end reveals more shocking. But he laid it on so thick that the narrator was obviously unreliable from the start, taking away that surprise and making the character’s paths obvious as the story progressed.
A deeply disturbing story, but not for the reasons you think
The Shards is supposed to make us feel uneasy because you can never know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. Everyone in the story wears a mask; some people wear multiple masks. And what they do when they change masks is disturbing. Finding out what people are capable of when they have masks to hide behind is terrifying. But I was more disturbed by the background stories. Each of those poor kids is so isolated and alone, and no one cares. Their parents, who should care the most, do whatever they can to get rid of them. The complete lack of caring, the isolation, and the lack of real human connection terrified me as I read. Even more so because I didn’t know whether it was fact (based) or fiction. I stayed up at night wondering how parents could leave the country for months at a time and not even talk to their child. How children were popping pills like M&M’s just to feel something and ultimately nothing. The world Ellis paints is so dystopian that I was heartbroken thinking about it, and that feeling stayed with me long after the book was over.
Rating: 7/10
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis is available now!
Learn more about the book at the official website for the title.
You might also like…
