Log 2

 

Good day, this is Leo. The book I'm sharing today is American Psycho.

    For me, horror novels is a brand new genre, usually people tend to feel fear easily through combination of graphics and sounds, after all, this is the most direct way to create a sense of stimulation. But after reading 50 pages of the novel, I found out that the author is excellent at creating sheer fear and disturbing feelings through minor details of the daily life of Patrick Bateman, the psycho himself.

    The fear brought to you by the novel isn't something as cheap as those jump scares or bloody scenes in those regular Hollywood horror movies. It's about relating the experience of a social elite to something that we couldn’t imagine he would encounter, thus, the huge gap of absurdity will create a very uncomfortable feelings when reading.

    Our protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is the chosen one that everyone envy. Magnificent look, a economic bachelor degree of Stanford, beautiful fiancé, and a promising future of being a stock manager in wall street. With so many perfect innate qualities and bountiful resources that he can use, there's no reason for him to be a psychopath, right? Ironically, that many advantages are the exact reason why he feels hollow inside. He have achieve d everything that everyone ever dreamt in a very young age. Basically, there’s nothing that can fulfill his urge for excitement, to satisfy his sense of narcissism.

    When the need isn’t satisfied, human'll try every single measures to fill up the holes inside. For the first few chapters, the author depict his and his friends' personalities through a taxi ride. Patrick likes to talk about how important he is to the society. "I'm creative, I'm young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I'm saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I'm an asset."  he says. While his friend Price likes to do meaningless counts during the conversation on the cab, what I mean by conversation is Price mocking at others' tragedies that are shown on the titles of newspapers. Strangled models, babies thrown from tenement rooftops, kids killed in the subway... etc are great material for his complain of the city, and the count isn’t meaningless at all, it represents the number of the homeless people they passed by, thirty.  

    On the other hand, they also compete for many other aspects. Which is quite interesting while watching because the words of idealism uttered from their mouth have nothing to do with what they actually do in private. For example, to impress the girls on the table, Partick came up with a list of the current social, economical, spiritual issues that takes up a page to describe. After he enjoyed the look of impress, they continue to dine in a French restaurant, wearing designer's clothes, having bottles of bottles of champagne while saying that materialism is spreading across young generations and it's a poison. 

    Rather than fear, disgust often took over my feeling. During this whole reading experience, the thought "How could someone be so hypocrite?" kept popping on my mind. On the other hand, it is what is actually happening in the real world, the sense of fear suddenly took over control again.