Product Description

Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist while still in college and almost immediately famous and wealthy, and then seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, even as your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs. Imagine having a second chance, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given.

Now married to the mother of his previously unacknowledged son and living in the suburban hinterlands, Ellis here recounts the unraveling of this new life. He glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character at his fateful Halloween party, and a car identical to his late father’s; his stepdaughter’s doll violently “malfunctions”, and their house undergoes bizarre transformations. Connecting these aberrations to graver events – a series of grotesque murders, and the epidemic disappearance of young boys – Ellis struggles to defend his family even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania.

Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting psychological and supernatural horror toward an astonishing resolution – about love and loss, fathers and sons – in what is surely the most powerfully original and moving novel of an extraordinary career.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #172629 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-07
• Released on: 2005-10-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 360 pages

Novel of the Week, The Telegraph, 1st October
..demonstrates a reinvigorated talent that is all the more impressive for its funny and frightening portayal of failure

The Telegraph magazine, 1st Oct
..has a mesmerising and elegiac ending which transcends the genre crescendo in the book's second half..

Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly, 23rd September 2005
The creepiest insight..and the most mature-is that some such longings may even survive death.

Customer Reviews

Hilarious, dark gothic masterpiece
This is an absolutely stunning novel: a laugh-out-loud social satire mixed with a surreal and genuinely scary horror story. Its ambiguity is entirely intentional. As with the Glamorama reviews, I'm amazed how many readers here have completely missed the point. When Ellis creates 'shallow' characters they are MEANT to be shallow. When he creates bizarre story shifts that defy logic, they are MEANT to do this. These are not failings of the author, but examples of his incredible command of language, his huge imagination, his devastatingly effective sense of humour, his bottomless capacity for parodying the worlds he scrutinises. Lunar Park was never meant to be a 'straight' novel with a standard plotline, as should be obvious from page 1. Go along with its playful mischief, its inspired gothic surrealism and its extremely dark humour and you will be in for a real treat. This is an all-time classic: one of the best 20 novels ever written. I'm off to read it again now.

"Don't call it a come back....."
Having read through the first few pages of this novel, I had to flick ahead to check if the first chapter was in fact an extended introduction. That's when the brilliance of this novel dawned on me. The adoption of the quasi-autobiographical style to this work was a stroke of genius demonstrating new depths to Easton Ellis' capabilities.

I was enthralled by this book from start to finish, and whilst nothing Easton Ellis has produced to date could ever stand up to his modern-day classic American Psycho, this would be the strongest contender from his catalogue. Witty; full of suspense; and engaging, this is a well written work of fiction.

With Lunar Park, Easton Ellis is completely redeemed after the nonsense that was Glamorama. Definitely a 2006 must have!

Wow!
I couldn't wait until October to get my hands on this so got it from the US.

I always thought BEE couldn't top American Pyscho. When the short stories collection 'The Informers' came out I thought I was right.

Then Glamorama turned up and I had to admit I was wrong.

Then Lunar Park arrived and I was blown away. This is a new direction for BEE. His writing has matured and he is tackling his own demons.

This is a very inventive novel that everyone should read, even if you were appalled by AP.