Bateman asks his girlfriend, “Why wasn’t Donald Trump invited to your party?” She replies: “Oh god. Is that why you were acting like such a buffoon? This obsession has got to end!” It provides a sense of this novel’s offbeat comedy to print Bateman’s response to this: “‘It was the Waldorf salad, Evelyn,’ I say, teeth clenched. ‘It was the Waldorf salad that was making me act like an ass!’” Who isn’t driven to the brink by a Waldorf salad?

This food talk is a reminder that “American Psycho” has yet to receive its full due as the most wicked and sustained mockery of the late-80s restaurant scene that we have in our literature. Bateman and his friends are forever sitting down to meals like eagle carpaccio and free-range squid and gazpacho with hunks of raw chicken in it.

The book’s consumption gets darker. By the end, Bateman attempts to turn a dead woman into meatloaf. Here we approach the grisly and infamous portions of “American Psycho.”

There are only a handful of torture scenes. This novel is not wall-to-wall mutilation; it’s wall-to-wall moral vacuity. Still, these scenes are brutal in their exactitude: There are power drills and chain saws and lips snipped off with nail clippers and vaginas cut out to store in gym lockers.

Mr. Ellis told The Paris Review he consulted an F.B.I. textbook about serial killers to come up with some of this stuff. I sometimes had to read between my fingers. Yet there’s also a comic book texture to the literal and figurative overkill.

Here again, Mr. Ellis was racing ahead of the culture. Something has happened since 1991 to our response to violence, especially when it is seasoned with a shake of wet or, especially, dry humor. Increasingly inured to the mess, we’ve learned to savor the wit.