A gripping return from the iconic author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero, The Shards is Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in over a decade—a bold, provocative, and haunting tale of obsession, paranoia, and violence in 1980s Los Angeles. LA, 1981. Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the elite Buckley prep school when Robert Mallory, a mysterious and charismatic new student, joins his group of privileged friends. But as Mallory insinuates himself into their lives, Bret grows increasingly fixated—both on Mallory’s hidden past and on a local serial killer known as The Trawler, whose grotesque crimes are beginning to touch their privileged world. Tension builds as Bret's suspicions deepen, his reality begins to fracture, and the lines between truth and delusion blur. Are the threats real—or is Bret losing his grip on reality? Sly, suspenseful, and laced with Ellis’s signature dark humor, The Shards is a masterful fusion of fact and fiction, exploring adolescence, desire, trauma, and the seductive danger of storytelling itself.