Imagine yourself in 1987, New York City.

The air is thick with cigarette smoke, the streets are lined with high-end designer stores, and the financial district is a battlefield of egos. Money is God, and if you don’t have a Rolex on your wrist, a reservation at the right restaurant, or the perfect haircut, you’re invisible. This isn’t some regular “work hard, get rich” culture. This is greed turned into a religion. Every Wall Street bro in the city is in a competition to outshine each other. Not with intelligence. Not with hard work. With status symbols. Wearing an Armani suit? Great. But does it fit perfectly? No? Then someone else just beat you.

You have a business card? Cool. But is it bone white with Silian Rail font? No? Then you just lost a silent war in a room full of rich, empty men who care about nothing except looking better than the next guy. It’s a fake world, where everyone is pretending to be important. A world where no one actually listens, no one actually cares, and no one actually sees each other.

And this is where Patrick Bateman is born. A world where status matters more than substance, where people are so busy competing with each other that they wouldn’t notice if the man sitting across from them at dinner was a monster.

Bret Easton Ellis Saw The Monster in the Mirror

The guy who wrote American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis, was in his early 20s when he started working on the novel. A young writer hanging around rich, coked-up Wall Street types, watching them talk about Louis Vuitton suits and expensive wines like it was a sacred ritual and Ellis saw something disturbing. None of these men had real personalities. It was like they were all performing a role. Wearing the perfect suit, saying the right things, but completely empty inside.

And that’s when he thought:

What if one of these men was a serial killer… and nobody noticed?

Boom.

That was the seed that grew into American Psycho, a book that wasn’t just about a murderer but about a society that was so detached, so self-absorbed, that a murderer could move freely among them, unnoticed. Ellis didn’t write a traditional horror novel. He wrote something far worse, a book that made readers question reality itself.

Bateman’s world was a mirror held up to society, TO YOU and the reflection was so ugly that people couldn’t handle it.

The Novel That Almost Got Banned

When American Psycho was finally published in 1991, it was immediately the most controversial book of the decade. This wasn’t just a crime thriller. This was a book that dove headfirst into the mind of a killer, not as a mystery, not as an action packed chase, but as a cold, emotionless, first person experience.

And the violence? It was detailed, methodical, gore. People didn’t know how to react.