Glamorama
By Bret Easton Ellis
Picador 1999
Cover designer unknown

Glamorama was Bret Easton Ellis’s first full novel since his immensely controversial American Psycho, about an unhinged, serial-killing investment banker, Patrick Bateman.

In many ways, Glamorama is a reprise of the earlier book, updating its themes from the 1980s to the 1990s. Haute Couture is the new Wall Street, international terrorism is the new serial killing, and this season’s Patrick Bateman is “model slash actor” Victor Ward.

Victor is as obsessed with being seen with the right people as Bateman was with having the right clothes and accessories. While both characters have similar problems with reality, Victor is markedly less psychotic. In the book’s many scenes of horrific violence – torture and bombings and the destruction of an aeroplane mid-flight – he is largely a passive accessory.

This UK cover, with its reflective silver shapes on a grey background, gives us a first taste of the glitz and shallowness of Victor’s life; On the first page Victor obsesses over the décor of a new nightclub he’s helping to open.

It’s a misleadingly pretty design, however. At least the original jacket of American Psycho gave something of a warning of its contents – the illustration of an inhuman businessman, half cyborg, half skinned-alive corpse advised the reader of a complex, disturbing character within.

The apparently innocuous cover of Glamorama, by contrast, gives little away about the unsettling contents. The silver hearts are confetti, an important motif in the novel. When Victor leaves his meaningless Manhattan life to travel to Europe – supposedly on a mission to track down an ex-girlfriend – bad things start to happen, and he begins to see confetti scattered everywhere. Here, this optimistic symbol is imbued with a hint of menace in the form of the long blue shard piercing the heart. But it’s only a hint. The name, Bret Easton Ellis, does the rest.