Bret Easton Ellis and his mates Tama Janowitz, Jay McInerney – the so-called literary ‘bratpack’ – established themselves in the Eighties by writing about smug yuppie trash at a time when everyone wanted to hear about smug yuppie trash. But yuppies, as everybody knows, have disappeared (or at least articles about them have, which is the same thing) so Bret has had to find a completely new topic. And so he has locked himself away for a few years, racked his brains, and come up with: the Psycho-Yuppie. You can see his publisher patting him on the head: not a great leap, admittedly, but... well done, Bret.

Publishers plural, rather, for American Psycho has gone through them at a rate of knots. It is about a young investment banker who, as early promotional blurb from the first, Simon and Schuster, put it, ‘just can’t seem to stop killing people especially young women’. Although S & S later