Patrick Bateman is a 26-year-old Wall Street trader, riding the crest of money hunger that accompanied the economic boom of the late 1980s. Smart, handsome and stylish, Bateman is something of a whizz-kid at work but, in his spare time, he thrives on designer suits, seeking out the next trendy restaurant, listening to Phil Collins and Huey Lewis on his state-of-the-art CD player and slicing up people(preferably women), and the odd homeless man(with a chainsaw)!

Bateman's appearance dovetails perfectly with the notion that, in the downtown 1980s, style and attractiveness functioned less as a statement than as an equalizer. Indeed, one of the running gags is that Bateman is virtually indistinguishable from a co-worker named Paul Allen, who is constantly mistaken for him. Ellis' novel deftly underscores the doubts and contradictions of a swirl of characters. For all his swagger and brutality, Bateman can be reduced to jelly at the suspicion that Donald Trump's limousine is passing by, or that the latest downtown restaurant actually has its menu in braille.

If there are dark patches of genuine humour and irony, there are also detours into cheap paper-back horror terrain that are arguably less satisfying,such as when Bateman wields a chainsaw on a pair of prostitutes.This inevitably conjures up mental images of Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

But American Psycho's most intriguing reading has to be Bateman's dialogues with an enigmatic, almost Dickensian NYPD detective named Donald Kimball. Polite to a T, and dutifully impressed by Bateman's office and designer clothes, Kimball seems to be toying with his prey, or is it the other way around? Nothing can be taken for granted in a story where someone drops the name of real-life psycho killer Ed Gein, only to be asked: 'Isn't he the maitre'd at Canal Bar?'

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