If fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, as Mark Twain once wrote, then these characters are the menacing exceptions to that shaky rule. At once, they seem impossibly ruthless, cold, implacable – calculating tyrants that reduce, in the imagination, even Pol Pot to a mere playground bully.
Who is Patrick Bateman?” asks our unreliable narrator at one point. Perhaps the ‘who’ could usefully have been replaced with a ‘why,’ but we have the answer to Bateman’s question. He is, to put it mildly as we tend to do, a sadist and a rapist, an unappeased cannibal, a necrophile, a mutilator – a physical manifestation of the Freudian id. In short, the kind of fright felt only in nightmares. Read more.
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