It took me until the last page of ‘The Shards’ to realise it wasn’t real

I reread Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘The Shards’ before the Disney+ series. Here’s my verdict

With the TV adaptation of The Shards landing on Disney+ in Australia on August 6, I did something I don’t often do: I went back and reread the book before watching the show.

I am, by my own admission, a big Bret Easton Ellis fan.

Sheepishly, American Psycho remains one of my favourite novels.

The Rules of Attraction is right up there too.

So when The Shards was announced as a six-episode series, double episode premiere included, I wanted to revisit the source material properly rather than relying on a three-year-old memory of it.

Here’s my confession: it wasn’t until the very last page that I clocked this was fiction.

The Shards is narrated by a character called Bret, an aspiring writer at LA’s elite Buckley prep school in 1981, who shares Ellis’ name, his first novel (Less Than Zero), his old yearbook photo and, seemingly, a great deal of his adolescence.

Ellis blurs memoir and thriller so carefully that the book reads like a diary for long stretches, before a serial killer known as The Trawler starts stalking the school’s tight, privileged social circle.

I found myself googling “was Bret Easton Ellis stalked by a killer in high school” partway through, which should tell you how convincingly the trick works.

It’s only in the author’s note at the close that the rug gets pulled, and you realise the whole thing has been an elaborate act of fiction wearing memoir’s clothes.

I’m not alone in finding that disorientation the book’s biggest strength.

When The Shards was released in 2022, reviewers (including a widely shared Guardian review) largely agreed the metafictional trick was the smartest thing about it, calling it something close to a return to form for Ellis after more than a decade away from fiction.

But the same reviews raised a fair criticism: at more than 600 pages, the novel can feel indulgent.

Whole passages read like Ellis lingering in his own nostalgia for 1980s Los Angeles, and some of the shock tactics that felt fresh in American Psycho and Less Than Zero land as more familiar the second time round.

Rereading it now, I’d say both things are true at once.

The slow-burn dread of not knowing where memoir ends and thriller begins is genuinely unsettling, and worth the time it asks of you.

But it is a big ask, and I understand why some readers bounced off the pacing before they got to the payoff.

For the TV adaptation, that length works in the show’s favour rather than against it.

Six episodes gives the story room to breathe in a way a single sitting of the book can’t quite replicate, and the cast, led by Igby Rigney as Bret and Homer Gere as the mysterious new student Robert Mallory, alongside Kaia Gerber, Wes Bentley and Evan Rachel Wood, has a lot of ground to cover.

I’ll admit I’m nervous about how a TV format handles that late reveal that undoes everything you thought you knew about what you’d just watched.

It’s the kind of trick that works best on the page, where you’re alone with your own doubt.

But I’m going in with an open mind, the same way I did with adaptations of American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction before it.

If the series can hold onto even half of that unease, it’ll be worth clearing your evening for.

The Shards premieres in Australia on August 6, exclusively on Disney+.