For some reason, people feel compelled to throw their foresaken copies of American Psycho at me. By throw I mean bequeath. I thought I'd make this clear. My violent vocabulary has caused me injury in the past. "Throw me that stapler," I once told a friend, who took my statement too literally, and hurled it at me. The stapler bounced off my vast forehead, drawing a tiny amount of blood but causing no other perceptible damage, although I realized that my friend probably wanted me dead. The lesson is: It is dangerous to live in a world that thinks too literally.

I've never actually read Bret Easton Ellis. I tried to read Less Than Zero but I couldn't get through it. "What's it about?" a friend asked me. "Rich kids from California," I told him. "They do coke, they do each other, they do coke, they do each other." My friend who had misheard, looked bewildered. "They do the polka, they do each other?"

I leafed through American Psycho, and what I find horrifying is not the violence --- which is pretty gruesome and leaves the reader feeling slimed --- but the shallowness of the characters, and at the same time, how plausible they are. These people do exist --- extremely privileged sorts who devote every minute to planning their designer wardrobes, acquiring the latest home entertainment system, checking out trendy new restaurants, working out at tony gyms, and screwing each other. "I am wearing a four-butti double breasted wool and silk suit, a cotton shirt with button down collar by Valentino Couture, a patterned silk tie by Armani and cap-toed leather slip-ons by Allen-Edmonds. Murphy is wearing a six-button double breasted wool garbardine suit by Courreges, a striped cotton shirt with a tab collar and foulard-patterned silk-crepe tie, both by Hugo Boss," says Bateman, a walking fashion catalogue from hell. Bateman already has everything money can buy, so he moves on to reacreational murder. It's the American Dream carried to a preverted extreme.

There are many yuppie scum who would find the sort of wretched excess in Ellis' novel attractive. They aspire to this lifestyle. That's why American Pyscho makes perfect sense. When you live in a society that caters to your every whim and you spend each day going from one pleasure to the next, you assume that everything exists for your entertainment.

That includes human beings.