fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of 'serious' literary writers -- including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself -- have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as 'low-brow' true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho , taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho , yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). 15 By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility -- challenging readers' expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional -- while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman's life as a New York ber-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis's work. Bateman's violence is rendered so