Bret Easton Ellis likes to offend people. His first novel, the best-selling “Less Than Zero” (1985), published when Mr. Ellis was 21 and a junior at Bennington College, romanticized the affluent sex-and-drug-crazed youth culture of 1980s Los Angeles. In “American Psycho” (1991), his third and most infamous work, a young, wealthy and drug-addicted investment banker carries out a series of brutal murders, or at least thinks he does. So shocking were that novel’s descriptions of violence that Simon & Schuster yielded to internal protests and dropped the book before publication. (It was published by Vintage instead.)

Mr....