A star of 1980s fiction tries for a comeback

After three months of life on Elsinore Lane (do note the "Hamlet" references), "Bret" has fallen off the wagon and sent it careening off a cliff: He and his wife are sleeping in separate bedrooms, and his son, Robby, can hardly stand to be around him.

Then the novel takes a detour into some literal-minded horror. You see, "Bret" is being haunted - by both his past and his writing. His house keeps growing green shag carpeting and pink stucco walls, like his childhood California home. A young man who's a doppelgänger for Ellis at 21 shows up, bearing the name of the hero from "Less Than Zero." His dad's tombstone appears in the yard on Halloween night. His stepdaughter's toy bird appears to have developed predatory instincts. More ominously, boys about Robby's age have been disappearing from the neighborhood; more gruesomely, someone is recreating the murders in "American Psycho."

While the Ellis of "Lunar Park" backs away from the more transgressive material of "Glamorama" and "American Psycho," that doesn't mean he's auditioning for the role of the 21st-century Jane Austen. There is still plenty in this new novel that's calculated to shock.

But "Lunar Park" owes its emotional punch to two things: the theme of estranged fathers and sons, and Ellis's undeniable eye for detailed satire. Take his description of a child's party: "Two weeks prior to the actual event there had been a 'rehearsal' party in order to gauge which kids 'worked' and which did not.... The whole thing seemed harmless - just another gratuitously whimsical upscale birthday party - until I started noticing that all the kids were on meds (Zoloft, Luvox, Celexa, Paxil) that caused them to move lethargically and speak in affectless monotones. And some bit their fingernails until they bled and a pediatrician was on hand 'just in case.' "

His 6-year-old stepdaughter pops Skittles the way she sees her mother pop prescription pills. The most genuinely frightening thing in the book is the fact that "Bret" has healthier ideas about parenting than the adults who aren't on cocaine.

While "Bret" spends as much time flirting with a female student as he does attempting to get closer to his son, there's enough real grief in the thwarted relationships he has with both Robby and his late father to make readers wish Ellis had spent more time writing about that than in creating anagrams for murderous toy birds.

But there's no denying the beauty of the ending. It's both surprising and unlike anything else in the book. If it's a sign of things to come, the literary exorcism Ellis conducts in "Lunar Park" has succeeded.

• Yvonne Zipp is a freelance writer in Kalamazoo, Mich.

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