American Psycho

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

Bret Easton Ellis places Patrick Bateman's extreme violence within the status-conscious world of 1980s Manhattan. The novel forces the surfaces of wealth and success into contact with grotesque brutality.

Read it as a difficult exercise in the limits of satire. The discussion can ask whether the shock exposes the culture surrounding Bateman, and how the narrator's voice shapes a reader's judgment.