Bret Easton Ellis is telling me how to write a sex scene. He doesn’t understand why novelists are so scared of them. Just keep it cold, keep it clinical. Hotness can only be achieved by “sparingly written, stripped down” prose. Ornate euphemisms are the writer’s enemy. “She doesn’t need to have a ‘love purse’…” sighs Ellis. “He doesn’t have to unsheathe his ‘giant purple sword’ and put it into her ‘love purse’…”
Ellis’s new novel The Shards was described this week by a usually prudish American newspaper as “his sexiest ever”. Few Ellis books are complete without ice-bound descriptions of sex, drug-taking, parties, murders, Los Angeles and music. Each is present in The Shards, which follows an unreliable narrator called “Bret Easton Ellis” through his final year of high school in 1981. Ellis, an aspiring writer, soon becomes fascinated by a serial killer called the Trawler. People disappear without explanation. And then the Trawler starts stalking Ellis’s friends.
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