The Shards - Bret Easton Ellis - Novella

Aug 24, 2026

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The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis is the original novel behind the upcoming American teen thriller television series The Shards, created by Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis and premiering on FX and FX’s Hulu in 2026.

Based on Ellis’s semi-autobiographical fiction, it brings readers into the dark side of 1980s Los Angeles, where a privileged high school community filled with parties, romance, ambition, and secrets slowly becomes trapped by fear and suspicion.

Set during the fall of 1981, the novel follows seventeen-year-old Bret, a student at the elite Buckley School in Los Angeles, as he navigates complicated friendships and hidden emotions during his final year of high school.

His close relationships with Susan Reynolds, Thom Wright, Debbie Schaffer, and other classmates create a world of youthful freedom and privilege, but beneath the surface are unresolved desires, personal conflicts, and secrets that threaten to change everything.

The arrival of Robert Mallory, a mysterious new student, disrupts the carefully controlled atmosphere of the school and introduces an unsettling sense of danger.

At the same time, Los Angeles is shaken by reports of a serial predator known as the Trawler, whose crimes create a growing atmosphere of anxiety throughout the city.

As Bret becomes increasingly fascinated and disturbed by the connection between Robert Mallory and the terrifying events surrounding them, ordinary teenage experiences begin to merge with psychological horror.

The story explores how fear enters an apparently perfect world and how memories of trauma can remain long after the events themselves have passed.

Readers searching for the original story behind The Shards TV adaptation, Bret Easton Ellis’s latest psychological thriller, or a dark fiction book with suspenseful character relationships can explore this complete reading resource. You can download the novel in PDF format here and upload it to your Kindle for offline reading. Explore Leaving Out the Middle: The Shards Fanfiction for an alternative continuation of the story.

Related mystery works such as The Housemaid offer another style of investigation-driven storytelling, featuring impossible crimes and detective puzzles.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages678

Reading Time17 h 24 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

FALL/1981

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Author's Note

A Note About the Author

Also by Bret Easton Ellis

White

Imperial Bedrooms Lunar Park

Glamorama The Informers American Psycho The Rules ofAttraction Less Than Zero

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ellis, Bret Easton, author.

Title: The shards / Bret Easton Ellis.

Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. | “This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf”—Title page verso.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022014761 (print) | LCCN 2022014762 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593535608 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593535615 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524712426 (open market)

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. | Thrillers (Fiction) .

Author's Note

A Note About the Author

For no one

Do you remember back in oldL.A. When everybody drove a Chevrolet?

Whatever happened to the boy next door The suntanned, crew-cut, all-American male?

“Beach Baby”The First Class

If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

1984

George Orwell

MANY YEARS AGO I REALIZED THAT A BOOK, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt. For a few of us the first ideas, images, the initial stirrings can prompt the writer to automatically immerse themselves in the novel’s world, its romance and fantasy, its secrets. For others it can take longer to feel this connection more clearly, ages to realize how much you needed to write the novel, or love that person, to relive that dream, even decades later. The last time I thought about this book, this particular dream, and telling this version of the story—the one you’re reading now, the one you just began—was almost twenty years ago, when I thought I could handle revealing what happened to me and a few of my friends at the beginning of our senior year at Buckley, in 1981. We were teenagers, superficially sophisticated children, who really knew nothing about how the world actually worked—we had the experience, I suppose, but we didn’t have the meaning. At least not until something happened that moved us into a state of exalted understanding. When I first sat down to write this novel, a year after the events had taken place, it turned out that I couldn’t deal with revisiting this period, or any of those people I knew and the terrible things that befell us, including, most crucially, what had actually happened to me. In fact without even writing a word I shut the idea of the project down almost as soon as I began it—I was nineteen. Even without picking up a pen or sitting at my typewriter, only gently remembering what happened proved too unnerving in that moment and I was at a place in my life that didn’t need the added stress and I forced myself to forget about that period, at least for a while, and it wasn’t hard to erase the past in that moment. But the urge to write the book returned when I left New York after living there for over twenty years—the East Coast was where I escaped almost immediately upon graduation, fleeing the trauma of my last year at high school—and found myself living back in Los Angeles, where those events from 1981 had taken place, and where I felt stronger, more resolved about the past, and that I was capable of steeling myself from the pain of it all and entering the dream. But this turned out not to be the case then either, and after typing up a few pages of notes about the events that happened in the autumn of 1981, when I thought I had numbed myself with half a bottle of Ocho in order to keep proceeding, letting the tequila stabilize my trembling hands, I experienced an anxiety attack so severe that it sent me to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai in the middle of that night. If we want to connect the act of writing with the metaphor of romance then I had wanted to love this novel and it seemed to be finally offering itself to me and I was so tempted, but when it came time to consummate the relationship I found myself unable to fall into the dream. THIS HAPPENED WHEN I WAS WRITING specifically about the Trawler—a serial killer who had been haunting the San Fernando Valley starting in the late spring of 1980 and then announcing their presence more strongly in the summer of 1981 and who was frighteningly somehow connected to us—and a wave of stress so severe crashed over me that night I began making notes I actually moaned with fear from the memories and I collapsed, retching up the tequila I’d been gulping down. Xanax I kept in the nightstand by my bed was no help—I swallowed three and knew they weren’t going to do anything quickly enough. In that moment: I was sure I was about to die. I dialed 911 and told the operator I was having a heart attack and then fainted. The landline I was calling from—this was in 2006, I was forty-two, I lived alone—alerted them as to where the location was and an alarmed doorman from the front desk of the high-rise I lived in escorted the EMTs to the eleventh floor. My apartment was unlocked by the doorman and they found me on the floor in the bedroom. I regained consciousness in an ambulance as it sped along San Vicente Boulevard toward Cedars-Sinai, a short distance from the Doheny Plaza, where I lived, and after I was wheeled into the emergency room prone on a stretcher and had reoriented myself as to what had happened, I became embarrassed—the Xanax had kicked in and I was calm and I knew there was nothing physically wrong with me. I knew the panic attack was directly related to the memories I had of the Trawler and more specifically of Robert Mallory. A doctor checked me out—I was basically fine but the hospital wanted me to stay the night so they could perform a battery of tests, including running an MRI, and my primary physician agreed, reminding me over the phone that my health insurance would cover almost all of the stay. But I needed to get home and opted out of whatever tests they wanted to administer because if I had stayed at Cedars that night I was sure I’d slip into madness, knowing that what happened to me had nothing to do with my body or any malady I may or may not have harbored. It was a reaction simply connected to memory, to the past and conjuring that awful year—to Robert Mallory, and the Trawler, and Matt Kellner and Susan Reynolds and Thom Wright and Deborah Schaffer, as well as the darkened tunnel I was traveling through at seventeen. AFTER THAT NIGHT I abandoned the project and instead wrote two other books during the following thirteen years, and it wasn’t until 2020 that I felt I could begin The Shards, or The Shards had decided that Bret was ready because the book was announcing itself to me—and not the other way around. I hadn’t reached out to the book because I spent so many years pushing myself away from the dream, from Robert Mallory, from that senior year at Buckley; so many decades spent pushing away from the Trawler, and Susan and Thom and Deborah and Ryan, and what happened to Matt Kellner; I had relegated this story to the dark corner of the closet

FAQs

What is The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis about, and what type of novel is it?

The Shards is a psychological horror and thriller novel set in Los Angeles in 1981. It follows seventeen-year-old Bret and his wealthy classmates at the elite Buckley School, whose world of parties, friendships, romance, and secrets grows increasingly disturbing after the arrival of mysterious new student Robert Mallory and amid fear surrounding a serial killer known as the Trawler.

How is The Shards related to the TV series that premiered on FX and Hulu on August 5, 2026?

The 2026 TV series The Shards is based on Bret Easton Ellis's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. Created by Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis, the adaptation brings the novel's 1981 Los Angeles setting, teenage characters, psychological tension, and dark mystery to the screen.

Who are the main characters in The Shards and what role do they play?

The Shards focuses on Bret, Susan Reynolds, Thom Wright, Debbie Schaffer, and Robert Mallory. Bret's complicated friendships and hidden feelings toward his classmates form the emotional center of the story, while Robert Mallory's arrival introduces uncertainty and danger into their seemingly perfect teenage world.

Is The Shards similar to American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis?

Both The Shards and American Psycho are written by Bret Easton Ellis and explore darker aspects of human behavior, identity, and obsession. However, The Shards focuses more on adolescence, memory, friendship, and psychological suspense through a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story.

Why does Bret become suspicious of Robert Mallory in The Shards, and how is the Trawler connected to the story?

Robert Mallory arrives at Buckley School at the beginning of Bret's senior year, just as a darker atmosphere is spreading across Los Angeles. Bret becomes increasingly unsettled by Robert and begins questioning whether the new student may be connected to the frightening events surrounding him. At the same time, the Trawler's attacks and disappearances create a separate but increasingly threatening mystery, leaving Bret to interpret clues, behavior, and coincidences without knowing how much of what he fears is real.

Where can I read and download The Shards ebook or PDF online?

You can read and download The Shards ebook or PDF directly from this webpage, with access to the available book resource for online reading and offline use.

Aug 24, 2026

2,224

Upload by Noah