The second movement also sets up the mysteries that will drive the novel, which is essentially about the inescapability of the past, toward its tragic conclusion. Strange occurrences, obscurely connected and ranging from the silly to the supernatural, become literal expressions of the tension and unease around the Ellis house. The family's pet, a Golden Retriever named Victor (yes, Ellis is still recycling character names), regards him with a weirdly intelligent suspicion. The paint is flaking off the outer walls of the house, and the sconces in the hall flicker whenever Ellis passes by. His step-daughter's toy Terby (a grotesque parody of the Furby) is exhibiting menacing and almost sentient traits, shredding pillows and walking on the ceiling.
The furniture in Ellis's living room is being covertly rearranged, ashy footprints stamped into a carpet that seems to be growing shaggier and turning green. Ellis keeps spotting his deceased father's old car; he's receiving blank emails (which he'll eventually discover contain astonishing attachments) from the bank where his father's ashes are stored; palm trees are springing up in New York; a mysterious figure who may or may not actually be American Psycho's Patrick Bateman is creeping around the periphery of his life, as is a weird and not-quite-seen creature from the woods. There are signs that the crimes committed in American Psycho are being re-enacted in real life, and around the area, boys close to his son's age are vanishing into thin air.
Ellis has said that he intended Lunar Park as an homage to Stephen King, and this becomes apparent in the book's third, final and weakest movement. Unfortunately, Ellis squanders some dark magnetism as he makes overreaching connections between his various mysteries, attempting to fire every gun he hung on the wall in the second movement. Sometimes he overstates obvious connections instead of letting the reader draw inferences; sometimes he works too hard to make everything cohere and obliterating the compelling blank areas that usually enrich his books. He drops into a terse, melodramatic procession of one-sentence paragraphs and reiterates the waves of panic and fear that overtake him so often, in such purple prose, that they lose their force.
The man who once revealed too little is perhaps now revealing too much, especially when the monster from the woods, which the reader assumes will remain ambiguous, makes a literal and disappointing (for the horror of the creature can never surpass our imagination of it) appearance. To say more would spoil it - this is essentially a mystery novel, and its mysteries must be preserved - but suffice it to say that Ellis's old life is literally overwriting his new one, and, as he clearly knows, in his former life he amassed debts that cannot go unpaid, no matter how far away he moves or how drastically he reinvents himself.
Even if Lunar Park takes an unfortunate turn during its protracted resolution, it's still an engrossing novel from an author who wears masks even as he ostensibly reveals all; an author with too sophisticated a view of authorial and personal responsibility to couch them in anything but shades of grey.
Even if Lunar Park takes an unfortunate turn during its protracted resolution, it's still an engrossing novel from an author who wears masks even as he ostensibly reveals all; an author with too sophisticated a view of authorial and personal responsibility to couch them in anything but shades of grey.
