Except the “Bret Easton Ellis” of Lunar Park is no more reliable a narrator than Bateman.In fact, he seems far more insane. It’s not just the egomania, the drugs or delusions (he believes that his daughter’s toy bird is able to urinate and capable of carrying out attacks on his family); every sentence suggests only the most slender grasp on reality. Almost nothing he writes can be taken seriously, no matter how hard he tries to convince us he is telling the truth.This combination of fiction and reality is mostly used for comic effect. Alongside people we know to be real (Ellis’s guests at a suburban house party include Jay McInerney, David Duchovny and cast members from the TV show Survivor), there are characters who are supposedly famous yet clearly don’t exist, such as Ellis’s wife, the actress Jayne Dennis, who appears in imaginary films with Keanu Reeves.Lunar Park is also filled with sly jokes and references that reveal the careful construction of this supposedly true tale.

Bret lives on Elsinore Lane, both a play on his surname and a hint that this is a Hamlet story as much as a horror novel; his dog Victor seems named after the protagonist of Glamorama, underlining Ellis’s harsh critique of his own fourth book.In the past Ellis has seemed proud of his avoidance of plot, or rather, his clever questioning of what is required from a novel. He has created a style entirely his own, a world away from the work of McInerney or Janowitz, who are essentially very traditional writers. While this has always been instinctually understood by Ellis’s fans, the American critical establishment have given him a relatively hard time: in Lunar Park, Ellis offers this as one justification for his drink-and-drug problem.Here he separates himself from his persona, and moves away from his usual territory to explore suburban gothic. Bret moves to a big house in a nice neighbourhood, marries an actress with whom he has a child several years before, and works on a pornographic thriller called Teenage Pussy.

As much as he tries to fit into this new life, he’s haunted by visions of his dead father, who appears to be acting out the murders from American Psycho and the disappearance of a number of teenage boys, a happening he’s convinced his son is somehow involved with.The author Ellis seems to be emulating most closely (and one of the few writers he confesses to be inspired by) is Stephen King. In many ways this reads like a variant on King’s “writer” novels, from The Shining (which gets an explicit name-check) to Bag of Bones. Like King, he is interested in fathers and authors; fictional creations becoming real; the presence of horror tropes as symbols for drink and drug use; Halloween; and the fear that, although the derangement of the mind is necessary for good writing, it can ultimately lead to murder and madness. Both authors also, in their later work, seem to be dealing with the aftermath of having achieved their fortunes through dwelling on the dark side.Ellis also jokingly borrows from The Amityville Horror, Ghostbusters, Poltergeist and The Exorcist, revealing that he hasn’t entirely lost his Eighties sensibility. His music tastes are stuck in the same decade, a deliberate joke and a way of making him seem out of touch with his kids.

But as with American Psycho, there’s an existential steeliness to his tone alien to the more folksy King.Lunar Park is an enormously entertaining novel, powered by a celebratory fun entirely absent in the writing of the generation of American writers who succeeded Ellis. Far less hardcore than anything he has written so far, it’s the novel that all his detractors should read, if only to discover that in spite of all the hype, the only person really damaged by American Psycho was – if we are to believe a word he says – Ellis himself.Matt Thorne’s novel ‘Cherry’ is published in paperback by Phoenix. Wodehouse: A life, by Robert McCrum (PENGUIN £8.99 (542pp))

Wodehouse’s infamous wartime gaffe is a godsend for his biographer. For 59 years of life, remarkably little of interest happened to this talented, hard-working writer. Though he achieved dazzling success as an author of adult fairy-tales, in print and on Broadway, PG Wodehouse emerges as a dull, genial workaholic. Along with his flirtatious wife and yapping Pekinese dogs, his passions were money and the sporting achievements of his old school, Dulwich Not very promising materials for a scintillating portrait.

But in 1940, this eternal innocent dithered in his Le Touquet home as the Wehrmacht swept into France. After internment, he was whisked to Berlin and agreed to give light-hearted broadcasts to his fans in America (which had still not entered the war) “The moral test with which Wodehouse was presented was.. beyond him,” writes McCrum. Though a gear-change is notable in the chapters devoted to this mauvais quart d’heure, the book is immaculately researched and readable throughout. The critical sections are enjoyable, but McCrum doesn’t quite explain Wodehouse’s enduring success.