He is trapped in the hells of his own creation with his own creativty, embodied by Clayton,

who’s a mixture of himself, Bateman, his father, Clay, everything that prompts him to create
and all the aspects of his psyche. He has descended into this hell, and the means of that
descent are irrelevant, be it through insanity, a supernatural agent or whatever. What matters
is that now he is experiencing what his protagonists, who were always himself, have
experienced, or rather what he made them experience. This could also explain the
vindictiveness of the Clayton entity, the embodied alter-ego, the ghost, the Eidolon: he is
taking revenge on the author and getting independence from him. He strays from the official
version of American Psycho in his murders because now he can choose his own path. Bret is
struggling against his own self and his own creative force. In a way, Ellis the actual writer is
using the world of this and his previous novels to pit himself against his own “demons” (hence
the nomenclature by the character Miller)

When Bret the character mentions “the writer” he refers both to a part of his split psyche,
probably the same part that created Patrick Bateman in the first place, as well as Ellis the real-
life writer, who seeps into the novel and becomes immanent in it, and acquires an influence
that goes beyond that which the author usually attains. He’s talking to his character, who’s a
version of himsel in the world of the novel, and uses his authorial power to whisper him lines
(sometimes about thing he could only know) and alter the world around him. It could be even
argued that he descends into the world of the novel to monitor from up close his character
development, even asking his questions about his feelings and behaviour, and overall studying
him.

Of course this splitting of his psyche might not have really happened to Bret in the world of the
novel, and his “the writer” persona is an addition in his retelling of the facts. But even if it is so,
this would be his later self seeping into the past to pester and influence his previous self, a
very similar circumstance. In fact, in a sense they are indistinguishable from each other, and it
is impossible to say which writer is the one that appears to Bret. After all in a way they are
both two avatars of the same person. (I sense some theological thing here. Even some
gnostical idea of a first and distant God overriding some lesser God’s authority and sending his
Messenger to earth, but of course everything occurs in a twisted and perverted manner.)

In the scene of the phone conversation with Clayton, we are told that the writer ran away and
hid screaming: creativity is rebelling against the creator. Be it that the writer is Bret in the
novel or real-life Ellis (or both), he feels now that his creation is out of control.

Another theme in the novel is that of the inexorability of the danger that the world poses to
human life, which is fragile and prone to disappear any instant, and how it is impossible for
anyone to protect their loved ones in a world set to detroy them. The Pater Familias is given
the task of protecting his family, but he sees himself powerless to do so, because danger, evil,
the “dark forces”, represented in manyfold fashion in the novel, are ubiquitous and invincible.

And it’s funny how Bret, Bret’s father and Bret’s creativity (the three elements conforming the
aparitions hunting him) sort of form a bizarre, twisted version of the Trinity.
It is also interesting how if the entity haunting Bret is himself, this then becomes true in
another sense, because after all, in making himself the main character and making him go
through the hauntings, Ellis the actual writer is haunting himself. Miller tells him that he
himself is the source of the haunting, which might not really be so after all, but it doesn’t
change that much, because the main meaning is that he has created all the entities that
torment him, and that he is the author of the book he’s now the protagonist of. All the
coincidences with the time of his birth and his father’s death and the name of the doll and the
number in Elsinore Lane, the name Elsinore itself, all of it is explained by his being the writer of
the story as well. And it gets even more interesting and more layered and more meta because
he’s the writer in this our world but also in the world of the novel he’s making a novel out of it,
so he’s yet again writing his miseries down, in a two-folded manner. The creator writes a story
about himself writing a story about himself. This is perhaps the reason for the novel being
written in a traditional past tense instead of Ellis’ usual present tense; this way he can create
the effect of the levels of authorship. And it is also interesting how he says that at some point
in the Four Seasons he decides that Lunar Park will be his last novel but at the time what he
was writing wasn’t Lunar Park nor was it called that so that this puts me in mind that who’s
speaking is actually one of the authors, or rather, since they are the same person, one of the
levels of the same author (after all will and representation are one and the same) or perhaps
both seeping into the novel and speaking through it.

Of course Bret claims to be an unreliable narrator, so the novel stands the interpretation that
already in the world of the novel everything is fiction, which would be interesting because in
that case Bret the character would be doing something very similar to what Ellis the author’s
doing: this pitting himself against his “inner demons” and what not. That would make them
even more indistinguishable.

God, what an amazing twist. “Not everything is about you”, the writer tells him. “I am writing
this, that is you are, but that doesn’t immediately make you the protagonist. The book is about
someone else.”

Funny how Bret tells us that we don’t need to believe him and can turn away, and immediately
after he says that he witnessed the event precisely because it seemed fake, as if saying “you
will keep on reading precisely because you don’t believe me, because you believe it is a novel,
because you know that at some level, either by Bret the unreliable narrator or Ellis the author,
you are being lied to.”

“It was the face of a father being replaced by the face of a son”. Consubstantiality of father
and son.

Can we consider that Patrick Bateman is really dead? Let us ponder. The whole point of the
novel is that there are these separate realms of fiction and that several of them have stepped
or fused into the other. Ellis’ characters from his previous novels are now appeating in the
fictitious world of Lunar Park, and not only his nightmares: Allen, his neighbour, is also a
character in The Rules of Attraction (of course it could be argued that in his insufferable
dullness he is a nightmare and that, Bret and perhaps Ellis too based this character in Allen the
“real” person, real here meaning being part of what’s either originally the fictitous world of
Lunar Park or our everyday world, but the circumstances are at least murky). But the real
question here is this: is the world presented in Lunar Park as the world in American Psycho the
same world that we consider the world in American Psycho? Or is it, like Bret is a new version
of Ellis, a new version of this world? Is the novel exactly the same? How can we be so sure?
After all, the world in Lunar Park resembles closely our own but is clearly not exactly the same,
not only because it is in a book (the main argument, really), but also because there really are
differences. Therefore it could be argued that the novel American Psycho, and its world, are
not the same that we know. If these novel worlds are not the same, then bret would be
modifying something in a world that’s not the one we consider as belonging to Psycho. Now,
assuming that yes, both Psycho worlds are one and only, can we be so sure that Bret, a
character in another fictitious world, can have power over it? Is he really the author, or just a
shadow, a version of him? If he really isn’t the author, does he have authorial power to modify
the world of Psycho? Can anyone modify another author’s world? Ellis himself has used
characters of other authors, and other authors have used his characters. Where does the
“canon” start and where does it end? Yes, we see that the world of Ellis’ previous novels (if we
considered it as being the same we know) is indeed seeping into and modifying the world in
Park, but would Bret’s possibilities, that of writing about another world be enough to modify
it? After all he is far from being immanent in the Bateman’s death story. All these conundra
ultimately refer to highly debated-over themes of the philosophy of aesthetics, and I don’t
think we can find a truly satisfactory answer. I guess it all comes to preference, and what I
prefer doing is leaving it like this, as a riddle, since after all “explanations are boring”.

I was thinking that I still have to find out whether Bret’s attempt to kill Bateman actually
works, but if it does initially that could be an argument against the two Psycho worlds being
one and the same (that is if we conclude he doesn’t have the authority to kill the “real”
Bateman). But I was also thinking that in any case, who’s ultimately writing all this, and the
novel’s so well done that you quickly forget about it, is real-life Ellis, so maybe he uses the
novel and his alter-ego in it in order to kill the character that perhaps has been actually
“haunting” him all this years, that is he overrides Bret’s authorship and authority and performs
the erasing.

I wanted to point to how Ellis’s been using the multiplicity of reality as a motif throughout his
career: in The Rules of Attraction, two parallel realities coexist and meet at certain points, to
later separate again. In American Psycho the character takes us through different layers of
reality, through versions of it where he’s murdered all of those people and through version of
it where he hasn’t. A similar “travel” through levels of reality can be experienced in some
stories in The Informers, specifically those dealing with supernatural phenomena. In
Glamorama several motifs and circumstances that at first appear as imaginary begin slowly to
seep into reality, and finally become a tangible part of it, directly giving shape to it. In Lunar
Park, well refer to evertything above, but basically we have characters of different fictitious
realms crossing into the reality of the novel. What about Less than Zero, then? Well, at first it
would seem that there isn’t much of such playing with reality in it, but if we consider how Clay
and the “Disappear here” sign feature so prominently in several of his other novels, it would
seem almost as if that first novel had some sort of omnipresence, a power and influence over
all of Ellis’s career. It’s as if the novel had never ended for him, and all the others were sequels
to it, perhaps culminating with the actual sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, which I haven’t read yet
but will soon, hopefully. In any case, what I mean is that this stretching into other novels is
indeed a form of the same “behaviour” we’ve seen the other novels had, in fact it seems to me
is the greatest expression of it. In a way it lords over the other novels.

Bret blames himself partially for his father’s fate, for not having tried harder, for having given
up on him, for having abandoned him, and he understands this now, once his son abandons
him… “if you’re a boy, you are your father” says John Self, by then Fat John, in Amis’s Money.
And it is true, we are condemned to be and determined by our forefathers. We are but
accumulation of the past. And now both Bret and his father find themselves longing for a
missing child, a child who abandoned them, and staring at pictures laid out as in an altar…
Now, if what Bret did wrong, at least in his opinion, is abandoining his father, isn’t Robby
repeating the mistake by abandoning not only Bret but the whole of the world? will he in his
attempt not to become Bret, still inexorably become him? Will he become anything at all? Is he
even still alive?

I wanted to add something about the man posing as Donald Kimball. If we follow this idead of
the characters from one fictitious world jumping onto the other, we can assume that he was
“possessed” by Bateman, and forced to perform the murders he committed, so that perhaps,
we can imagine how at some point he understood that what he was doing was followinjg
Psycho, and figured that to full understand what was happening to hium it was necessary to
talk to the man who wrote Psycho, and that’s why he contacted Bret. Of course there’s the
matter of the name. Why would he use a name that Bret could recognize as being false? Well,
this is a little trickier, but one of the possibilities is that he was also a little disturbed, and
decided to mess with Bret a little too, or perhaps Kimball himself became manisfest in the
world of Park, in the same person as Bateman. However it may be, it seems to me that his
disaffection when telling Bret that the murders weren’t following Psycho anymore was a result
of the only lead he had not taking him anywhere. If he wasn’t unwittingly following a novel,
then what was happening to him? Of course he had no way of knowing that he was following
the novel much closer than anyone ever could. This would also explain his confessing the
crimes. Perhaps once he was caught he finally saw a way out of his situation, and since
probably by then his psyche wasn’t Bateman’s anymore, he migh have even started to feel
remorse.

Of course we can never know what went through the mind of the character: the obstacles are
many. All of this is mere supposition. So we can’t really know whether he really was possessed
by Bateman. But, as I’ve been pointing out quite a bit lately, if it seemed like he was, and, since
in this case attainging objective truth is even more difficult than it usually is, there’s no way of
measuring the veracity of the different theories, then Bret’s theory of Bateman’s coming into
the world is just as true as any other. Appeareances is all there is to judge by, and I’ll be
damned if it didn’t look like Bateman really was commiting the crimes.

Bret says he doesn’t know what called his son away from “Neverland”, what made him come
back for those few minutes, but I don’t know how honest he is about this. Is the event
occurring at all, or is it part of Bret’s fiction? Is Robby now the new Eidolon, the new ghost that
Bret’s conjuring up through his writings like he did with Clayton? Of course you could argue
that the whole of the book is Bret’s fiction, and indeed you would be right, because he is the
writer after all, both in the world of the novel and in the real world, so that it certainly is his
fiction. On how many levels though, that’s for the reader to decide I guess. Personally I like the
idea of Robby’s last appearance as being the new form the ghosts that haunt Bret have taken.
A forgiving form now, instead of vindictive, finally breaking the chain of hatred (Robby, Bret,
Bret’s father, Bret’s grandfather and who knows how far back in time): finally a son forgiving
his father. An Eidolon that comes back to love, not to haunt. So that it doesn’t really matter
whether he really meets his son there, just like the means of his descent into hell didn’t really
matter as well: what’s important is that he now has found redemption.

Bret’s last words towards his father apply also to his son, and could be Ellis also saying them to
his father and to his real life lover, both of whom the book is dedicated to. But I guess they
apply to the dead in general, at least to the dead we’ll miss.

The title… Lunar Park, a moonscape, basically, like the one his son leaves behind, the one
where his son used all his “burning, ceaseless intention”(things he inherited from Bret? After
all Bret is a talented, and thorough, artist), and where he left that last mysterious word, the
same that was scribbled on Bret’s father’s ashes (what is it? “Robby”? “Bret”? “Father”?
“Son”? “Family?” “Forgiveness”? “Loneliness”?“Death”?... or maybe something like “YBRET”?).
But also, in spite of what Bret tells us, a play on all the amusement parks with that name (his
house was sort of a theme park for a while, or at least a haunted hause in one of those parks),
all of which have a gigantic, wicked-looking face at the entrance that stares at your very soul
goddamnit. Also lunar is the root word for “lunatic”, and regardless of whether Bret’s out of
his mind or not, what happens to him truly is insane.

Well that’s about all I wanted to say about this wonderful book which now I’ll miss bitterly.