From Bateman to Rat Man: American Psycho's unnatural selections

This chapter reads Bret Easton Ellis’s slasher satire American Psycho (1991) as a novel about the displacement of affects in capitalism. Using ideas from evolutionary psychology alongside writers on economy and psychoanalysis, this chapter investigates how structures of feeling in the finance economy of the narrative are both symptomatic and constitutive of the capital relationship—hiding the truth as well as facilitating lies. Patrick Bateman, Ellis’s financier protagonist and serial killer, becomes the horror hidden in plain sight that we all experience and yet repress in our everyday world.