The Shards

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright © 2023 by Bret Easton Ellis Corporation All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Hal Leonard LLC: Excerpt from “Vienna,” words and music by Warren Cann, Christopher Allen, William Currie, and Midge Ure. Copyright © 1981 by Hot Food Music Ltd., Sing Sing Songs Ltd., Jump-Jet Music Ltd., and Mood Music Ltd. All rights in the U.S. and Canada administered by Universal-Polygram International Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC. ∙ Peermusic (UK) Ltd.: Excerpt from “Beach Baby” by John Shakespeare and Gillian Irene Shakespeare. Copyright © 1974 by Peermusic (UK) Ltd., copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Peermusic (UK) Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ellis, Bret Easton, author. Title: The shards / Bret Easton Ellis. Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. | “This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf”—Title page verso. Identifiers: LCCN 2022014761 (print) | LCCN 2022014762 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593535608 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593535615 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524712426 (open market) Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. | Thrillers (Fiction). Classification: LCC PS3555.L5937 S53 2023 (print) | LCC PS3555.L5937 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20220406 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022014761 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022014762 Ebook ISBN 9780593535615 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover image based on a photograph by Steve Speller / Alamy Cover design by Chip Kidd ep_prh_6.0_142242128_c0_r0 For no one Contents Cover Introduction Epigraph FALL/1981 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Author's Note A Note About the Author Also by Bret Easton Ellis _142242128_ MANY YEARS AGO I REALIZED THAT A BOOK, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt. For a few of us the first ideas, images, the initial stirrings can prompt the writer to automatically immerse themselves in the novel’s world, its romance and fantasy, its secrets. For others it can take longer to feel this connection more clearly, ages to realize how much you needed to write the novel, or love that person, to relive that dream, even decades later. The last time I thought about this book, this particular dream, and telling this version of the story—the one you’re reading now, the one you just began—was almost twenty years ago, when I thought I could handle revealing what happened to me and a few of my friends at the beginning of our senior year at Buckley, in 1981. We were teenagers, superficially sophisticated children, who really knew nothing about how the world actually worked—we had the experience, I suppose, but we didn’t have the meaning. At least not until something happened that moved us into a state of exalted understanding. When I first sat down to write this novel, a year after the events had taken place, it turned out that I couldn’t deal with revisiting this period, or any of those people I knew and the terrible things that befell us, including, most crucially, what had actually happened to me. In fact without even writing a word I shut the idea of the project down almost as soon as I began it—I was nineteen. Even without picking up a pen or sitting at my typewriter, only gently remembering what happened proved too unnerving in that moment and I was at a place in my life that didn’t need the added stress and I forced myself to forget about that period, at least for a while, and it wasn’t hard to erase the past in that moment. But the urge to write the book returned when I left New York after living there for over twenty years—the East Coast was where I escaped almost immediately upon graduation, fleeing the trauma of my last year at high school—and found myself living back in Los Angeles, where those events from 1981 had taken place, and where I felt stronger, more resolved about the past, and that I was capable of steeling myself from the pain of it all and entering the dream. But this turned out not to be the case then either, and after typing up a few pages of notes about the events that happened in the autumn of 1981, when I thought I had numbed myself with half a bottle of Ocho in order to keep proceeding, letting the tequila stabilize my trembling hands, I experienced an anxiety attack so severe that it sent me to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai in the middle of that night. If we want to connect the act of writing with the metaphor of romance then I had wanted to love this novel and it seemed to be finally offering itself to me and I was so tempted, but when it came time to consummate the relationship I found myself unable to fall into the dream. — THIS HAPPENED WHEN