The Shards

The Shards is a 2023 autofiction/horror novel by American author Bret Easton Ellis, published on January 17, 2023, by Alfred A. Knopf. Ellis's first novel in 13 years, The Shards is a fictionalized memoir of Ellis's final year of high school in 1981 in Los Angeles. The novel was first serialized by Ellis as an audiobook through his podcast on Patreon.

Plot summary
Bret, the narrator, relates the story of the events of his senior year of high school in 1981, of he and his close circle of friends' acquaintance with new student Robert Mallory and the tragedy that followed. Bret and his friends are all the children of affluent film directors, producers, and other major players of the Hollywood scene, living in the heights and canyons of the Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles. The main characters are Generation X kids with much freedom to come and go as they please from their homes as their distant parents focus on their own lives and sexual freedoms. They all attend an elite prep school, Buckley, have easy access to drugs, go to lavish parties, and drive luxury cars. Bret, although tightly knit with the rest of the group, is also somewhat of an outsider, renowned for his overactive imagination as a writer.

When new student Robert Mallory first arrives at Buckley, Bret is sure he had seen him at a movie theater months before, but Robert denies this. Bret learns that Robert had previously spent time in a psychiatric facility. Immediately and thereafter, Bret distrusts him and comes to believe that Robert is responsible for the murders of the "Trawler", a serial killer that has been targeting mainly female teenagers in the Los Angeles area. The Trawler's victims first find that furniture has been mysteriously rearranged in their homes, then their pets disappear and they receive phone calls with hang-ups, before they are abducted, mutilated and killed, and their corpses and those of their pets are later found made up into an "assemblage." The Trawler is thought to be connected to a mysterious Satanic cult operating in the area known as the Riders of the Afterlife.

Bret's circle of friends, which includes the Homecoming king and queen - Thom and his girlfriend Susan - all welcome Robert into their circle and trust him throughout the novel, despite Bret's insistence that Robert is a liar, psychotic and "deranged." These accusations all fall on deaf ears, and Bret's girlfriend Debbie believes Bret is imagining things. Bret is gay, but passes as straight. At one point, Bret is lured to a hotel suite by Debbie's father Terry, a big name film producer with connections throughout the industry, who claims he will help Bret with writing a script for a teen film. Instead, he takes sexual advantage of Bret. Bret becomes increasingly distant from his girlfriend Debbie as he engages in casual sex with two of his male classmates, Matt and Ryan. Matt's pets mysteriously vanish and he later finds the furniture in his house rearranged, and shortly afterwards, Matt goes missing and his dead body is later discovered in a grotesque arrangement with the corpses of his pets. The police rule this to have been an accidental death by misadventure involving heavy drug use, but Matt's father confides in Bret he is certain his son was murdered.

Becoming increasingly paranoid, tension rises as Bret pieces together more and more details that appear to link Robert to the Trawler's victims, while his friends grow increasingly trustful of Robert and believe that Bret's mistrust is unfounded. Robert meanwhile claims that he is being followed by some 'freak' who has been stalking him from a distance for some time. Bret discovers that Susan is cheating on Thom with Robert, and their secret affair eventually blows up. Not long afterwards, Debbie begins to receive silent phone calls and her horse is found mutilated and killed. She is later attacked in her swimming pool by an unseen assailant who she narrowly escapes.

After an attack on Susan and her former boyfriend Thom by a masked man, who flees after Susan bites into his arm, Bret goes to Robert's penthouse apartment, seals the door to the unit, unplugs the phones, and grabs a kitchen knife to confront Robert. The two end up in a knife fight. Robert falls to his death, and it is ruled a suicide based on Bret's account of events.

The police discover the remains of one of the Trawler's victims in a house in Benedict Canyon belonging to Robert's uncle, at which Robert had frequently stayed. It appears that Bret was correct all along, and he briefly gains celebrity status at the school due to having apparently caught the serial killer. However, the Trawler soon claims another victim, and a note sent to police by the killer reveals they were not Robert at all, but had rather committed the killings as an act of sacrifice to Robert, who they named 'The God.' Although they admit to all the killings, they deny any involvement in the attack on Thom and Susan, and declare that now that their 'God' is dead this will be their last killing. Nothing more is heard from the Trawler, but Bret's reputation and popularity immediately plummets as his story is proven false, and after noticing a bite mark on Bret's arm in the exact place she bit her assailant, Susan comes to believe it was Bret who attacked herself and Thom.

Two decades later, Thom attends a book signing by Bret, now a famous author, and asks Bret if it was him who attacked Susan and himself that night. Bret denies this and speculates it was the Trawler in an unsuccessful killing attempt. The novel's ending is ambiguous, leaving the identity of the Trawler, Susan and Thom's attacker, the exact nature of Robert's death, and indeed Bret's account of the whole ordeal open to debate.

Publication
The Shards was first serialized as an audiobook read by Ellis through his podcast on Patreon. The audio serial was published in twenty-seven individual installments, released between September 6, 2020, and September 6, 2021.

On December 1, 2021, Ellis announced on Instagram that the manuscript of The Shards had just arrived for him to look over. In May 2022, pre-orders for the book were made available. It was published by Alfred A. Knopf on January 17, 2023.

Reception
The Shards received favorable reviews, with a cumulative "positive" rating at the review aggregator website Book Marks, based on 25 book reviews from mainstream literary critics.

Reviewing the audiobook for The Times in 2021, Theo Zenou called it Ellis's "weirdest, most interesting work in years" and felt it was "rendered all the more absorbing" by the audiobook format.

Kirkus Reviews wrote, "The usual issues with Ellis apply to this bulky novel: The flatness of the characters, the gratuitousness of the violence, the Didion-esque cool that sometimes reads as Olympian smugness. But as the story proceeds, it also becomes easier to admire Ellis' ability to sustain the mood."

Publishers Weekly wrote that the book "feels like two disparate novels—an overly detailed, fictionalized memoir and a high gothic serial killer thriller—that never come together meaningfully or believably."

Melissa Broder said in The New York Times that the book "invit[es] the reader more profoundly into the emotional realm of the protagonist" than Ellis's earlier works. While the length and looping narrative helped build suspense, the reader wonders if the book could have been shorter and still achieved the same psychedelic, collage-like effect". Broder concluded that "the novel's climax and denouement ultimately fall flat".

Television adaptation
In April 2023, it was reported that HBO was developing a television series adaptation of the novel. Ellis will write and executive produce with Nick Hall and Brian Young. In a June 2023 interview with the Spanish publication El Independiente, Ellis confirmed that Luca Guadagnino is set to direct the series with Ellis himself saying that he may direct some episodes as well. In September 2023, Jacob Elordi was reported to be in talks for a role in the adaption.