Yes, American Psycho Is Banned!

American Psycho is narrated by Patrick Bateman, a 26-year-old investment banker on Wall Street in the late 1980s who is also a serial killer. Or maybe he isn’t. The novel blurs the line between Bateman’s detailed accounts of his murders and his obsessive catalogs of designer clothing, restaurant reservations, and business card fonts. Bret Easton Ellis wrote it as a satire of Reagan-era consumerism and masculine vanity. His original publisher, Simon & Schuster, dropped the book before publication after employees protested its content. Vintage Books picked it up in 1991, and both Ellis and his editor received death threats.

American Psycho was banned outright in Queensland, Australia and restricted to adults-only sale (sold shrink-wrapped) across the rest of the country. Germany classified it as restricted, available only to those 18 and older. In the U.S., it appeared on the ALA’s list of 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s. The Texas prison system refuses to carry it. China censored the 2000 film adaptation. Ellis himself was banned from the opening ceremony of Euro Disney. The objections are straightforward: the violence in the novel is graphic, prolonged, and deliberately sickening.

Why You Should Read This

Ellis wrote the most repulsive narrator in American fiction and dared you to keep reading. The violence in American Psycho is genuinely difficult to get through. It’s supposed to be. The entire novel is structured so that Bateman’s murders and his opinions about Phil Collins and Huey Lewis occupy the same emotional register. That flatness is the satire. A man who can discuss a business card’s font weight with the same passion he brings to dismemberment is Ellis’s portrait of a culture that prices everything and values nothing.

The book isn’t for everyone, and it shouldn’t be on a middle school shelf. But banning it entirely, or restricting it to adults-only in shrink wrap, treats readers like they can’t handle a book that’s doing something deliberately provocative with its violence. The people most disturbed by American Psycho are often the ones who’ve never read past the surface. Underneath the horror is a devastating critique of wealth, status, and the emptiness at the core of American ambition. You can decide it’s too much. But you should make that choice for yourself.