Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to a head-on collision with America's greatest dream - and its worst nightmare - American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront. 'Serious, clever and shatteringly effective' Sunday Times 'American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel... The novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly... A seminal book' Fay Weldon, Washington Post 'For its savagely coherent picture of a society lethally addicted to blandness, it should be judged by the highest standards' John Walsh, Sunday Times 'That the book's contents are shocking is downright undeniable, but just as Bonfire of the Vanities exposed the corruption and greed engendered in eighties politics and high living, American Psycho examines the mindless preoccupations of the nineties preppy generation' Time Out.