The book that follows the immaculate suit, perfect body, expensive restaurants, correct business card and utterly rotten interior of Patrick Bateman.

Set in the polished corporate hell of late-1980s Manhattan, the novel turns consumer culture, masculine performance, wealth, status anxiety, and sexual violence into a deadpan nightmare of surfaces. Everything is brand, menu, outfit, transaction, repetition — and somewhere inside all that lacquer, a person may or may not still exist.

Notorious on publication and still uncomfortable to read, American Psycho is less a simple serial-killer novel than a cold, satirical autopsy of capitalism’s ideal subject: beautiful, empty, competitive, endlessly consuming, and capable of anything because nothing means anything. A key work of late twentieth-century American fiction for readers interested in transgression, satire, horror, postmodernism, moral panic, and the psychosis of expensive taste.

Vintage paperback, 1991. Good used condition with some rubbing, edge wear and light creasing to covers; pages age-toned but clean and intact.