She was standing across the street from a CVS pharmacy that used to be, decades ago, a New Wave roller-disco rink called Flipper’s, and on the way out to Palm Springs the sight of the woman caused me to remember the last time I had been to Flipper’s in the spring of 1981 before Robert Mallory appeared that September and everything changed.
Like Stephen King’s It, Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards is about a belated return to past horrors. Ellis had already called his Lunar Park (2005) a homage to King, but the influence has not slowed, certainly not during the writing of this novel which is so afflicted with nostalgia. It is the story of seven adults who revisit their hometown, Derry, Maine, where a carnival menace has reappeared after thirty years. With The Shards, as Ellis explains in the preface, the late middle-aged author is able after forty years of deferral to chronicle the fall of 1981, his senior year of high school in Los Angeles, when something terrible was happening to him and his friends. In King’s novel, the evil is a singular thing, it, albeit with many gothic forms and appendages, seven different experiences for seven victims. In Ellis’, as his title suggests, there’s a lot of separate sinister things going on: a new student with a patchy biography; someone prowling the hills; creepy cultists who act like it’s still the sixties; Hollywood’s much rumored depredations. This story belongs to Ellis alone, as far as we’re concerned, and the dedication page cheekily declares that it’s “For no one”.