Nine titles between 1985 and 2023. Original American editions, with the French title of each.
Ellis publishes rarely: thirteen years separate Imperial Bedrooms from The Shards. The list below is the whole of it: eight books of fiction and one of essays.
French title: Moins que zéro
Clay comes home to Los Angeles for the Christmas break. Four weeks of parties, cocaine and drained pools, in a voice already emptied of affect. Written while Ellis was still a student.
Novel
French title: Les Lois de l'attraction
Camden College, a barely disguised Bennington. Three narrators who never quite hear one another, and sentences that begin mid-phrase.
Novel
French title: American Psycho
Patrick Bateman, Wall Street, 1987: business cards, restaurant reservations and murders, all set down in the same flat register.
NovelFilm French edition 2 reviews Patrick Bateman Sean Bateman The affair
French title: Zombies
Thirteen linked pieces set in Los Angeles in the early eighties. Rock managers, students, a vampire. His only collection.
Stories
French title: Glamorama
Victor Ward walks out of a club opening and into a terrorist cell staffed by models. Paranoia, confetti, and a film crew that is always already there.
NovelFrench edition Sean Bateman Victor Johnson, puis Victor Ward Lauren Hynde
French title: Lunar Park
A narrator called Bret Easton Ellis, a house in the suburbs, a haunting. False memoir turned ghost story; the book where the father finally appears.
NovelFrench edition 2 reviews Mitchell Allen « Bret Easton Ellis »
French title: Suite(s) impériale(s)
Clay returns twenty-five years later as a screenwriter. The same city, a harder light. A sequel that reads like a settling of accounts.
Novel
French title: White
His first book of non-fiction: Generation X, the films of his adolescence, social media, and the moral tone of the 2010s.
Essays
French title: Les Éclats
Autumn 1981, a private school in Los Angeles, a serial killer known as the Trawler. Serialized on his own podcast before it was a book.
NovelCovers shown here are typographic placeholders: no jacket is reproduced without permission. Publication data refers to the original American edition. A 2007 British e-book, Water from the Sun and Discovering Japan, reprints two chapters of The Informers and is not counted here as a tenth title.
French editions The American Psycho affair Critical reception
Seven characters cross from one book to another, and nearly every crossing passes through Camden College, the barely disguised Bennington of the second novel.
The narrator of the first book comes back as the narrator of the ninth, twenty-five years older and working in film.
One chapter in a campus novel, then an entire book. The most famous character in Ellis first appears as somebody's older brother.
Patrick's younger brother, and the character who travels furthest across the work.
He changes surname between the two books. A minor boyfriend at Camden becomes the centre of the longest novel.
The rare case where a later book retroactively kills a character: Glamorama reveals she died shortly after the end of the previous novel, and that a body double took her place.
A supporting figure from Camden who resurfaces two decades later in the suburban ghost story.
The author writes himself in as the narrator, twice, eighteen years apart. Neither book is a memoir.
Cross-checked on 8 September 2026 against the encyclopaedic entry for each novel, in particular the one for The Rules of Attraction, which is where most of these threads meet.