Andrew Smith's Reviews > The Shards

The author opens up with a section telling how it’s taken him some forty years to write this book. It is, he says, based on events he witnessed; acts of violence perpetrated on people he knew, friends. He says that he’d tried to write the book years ago but at that time the act of recalling events he’d lived through had freaked him out so much he’d ended up in hospital, suffering from the mother of all panic attacks. When he was a high school senior, at seventeen years of age, a new boy had arrived at his school and joined his friendship group. This boy, it was later revealed, had had a difficult past and though on the face of it he seemed to be fully adjusted, he was actually anything but. He was to become a prowler, a killer and he was to badly hurt at least one of Bret’s close friends.

Bret Easton Ellis attended The Buckley School in Los Angeles, an establishment available to the rich and pampered. At the time of the events he covers here his parents were away on a long trip abroad, so he’d been left at home for an extended period with the family dog and a maid who prepared his breakfast and cleaned up after him. All his friends similarly lived in grand houses, drove expensive cars and seemed to have free rein to do whatever they wanted. In addition, they all had access to the drugs of their choice. Bret had a girlfriend, Debbie, but in all honesty he wasn’t sure if he preferred guys; he was at that juncture where adolescence is about to make way to adulthood, but he wasn’t quite there – he references this thought a number of times.

Set in 1981, Bret talks a lot about the music he and his friends were listening to, and this fixed the timeframe in my mind too, with British singers such as Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello and Glenn Tilbrook also being amongst my favourites in the early Eighties. Having been transfixed by the opening section I truly believed I was reading a true account of events Bret had lived through, and yet as I came across long conversations which he repeated seemingly verbatim and detailed recollections regarding his own thoughts at that time, I concluded that a degree of artistic license was in play. So what was this: a factual account, a piece of fiction or something in between? I couldn’t really work it out. But I didn’t dwell on this too long as either way I was fully invested by now.

It’s a lengthy story - I listened to a 22 hour long audio version, read by the author – but every time I paused I just couldn’t wait to get back to it. I found it to be such a compelling story, and hearing it told through Bret’s voice added something for me. It just felt right. There’s a lot sex and violence here, much of it very graphic. There are other disturbing scenes too, so this one is definitely not for the squeamish or faint-hearted. But there is a richness in the writing and in the narrative that I believe lifts it above all but the very best books. As I approached the end I thought I’d worked it all out, but a surprising and somewhat ambiguous ending cast some doubt on that. It’s definitely one of the most mysterious, addictive and truly impactful books I’ve come across in a very long time.

My sincere thanks to W. F. Howes Ltd for supplying a copy of this audiobook, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.