Life's a scream.
But when a novel comes along, like Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho did in 1991, staking a claim to the same salacious territory that the movies would mark off as their own, it becomes a game of catch-up, a fake show of deference to the written word. The book still reads like some kind of stunt, proving it was possible to turn out page after page armed only with the latest Zagat dining guide and a stack of designer catalogs. With this in mind, the film version of American Psycho may be the best thing that ever could have happened to it.