Why are Bret Easton Ellis's characters so evil?

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I've never read the guys work, but from what I've heard, the characters he creates are Complete Monsters, and his world suffers from a serious case of Black and Black Morality. I believe that characters don't necessarily have to be likeable to be compelling, but Ellis takes it overboard. No characters with depth, no audience connection.

Sort of how James Elroy's characters are flawed, often despicable characters. When I read his novel LA Confidential, I wanted all the major characters to die.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

how do you know if you've never read any of his work?

Do yourself a favour and at least read American Psycho. It's brilliant.

i didn't care for American Psycho so much - it ended up seeming weightless once the character's acts were suggested to be fantasies - but I was impressed by The Informers. Ellis became a literay figure for a brief time, I think, because he tapped into a certain mood of the time (zeitgeist), that of soullessness and alienation. His Bateman is a modern archetype, of sorts. He's not even evil; he's just spiritually empty.

Even so Dostoyevsky wrote Crime & Punishment a hundred years earlier and it is still more relevant/topical than Ellis' work.

For Dostoyevsky, evil was always a byproduct of madness and/or extreme suffering.

It's never actually confirmed in the book whether Patrick is or isn't actually just fantasising/hallucinating. That was one of the interesting parts about it for me. I like ambiguities. I noticed no lack of weight, in fact I was incredibly stimulated by it. It raised the idea in me that people's cognitive biases or their 'investment in normalcy', if you will, might prevent them from seeing and hearing the 'real' Patrick. He tells a woman he's in 'murders and executions' and she hears 'mergers and acquisitions'. And you can think, oh Patrick just thinks he said that, or that's what he daydreamed about saying. But there's nothing in the book that suggests he didn't actually say it.

I agree with you on the rest.

Ellis once said in an interview, "I write about things that p-ss me off." American Psycho is meant to be a satire of the yuppie culture of the 1980s, and of consumerism in general. Although if it's good, moral characters you want, you should check out Lunar Park, where Ellis (the protagonist of the story) comes to terms with a lot of his inner demons.

I didn't say I wanted good moral characters. A little grayness is fine, but my point is that if nearly all of your characters are downright scum, the audience experiences apathy. If Ellis hates the characters, whats stopping us from hating them?

Lunar Park is one hell of a book, but got boring about halfway through.

I agree and don't ever read his books anymore. I read them some in the 80's because he is very good at accurately depicting the 80's. But his characters have no humanity. They are just awful people he created to mock, as part of mocking the materialism of the 80's. They're strawmen more than actual characters.

When Less Than Zero was made into a movie it wasn't a very good movie overall but I think Robert Downey Jr. put more humanity into the character than was ever written in the book. A good actor can do that.

Bought Less Than Zero today. Maybe I can prove myself wrong.

I quite liked Less Than Zero.