A lot of things have been said about Bret Easton Ellis over the course of his 34-year career, but no one could ever accuse him of being inoffensive. His first novel, Less Than Zero, portrayed the nihilism of privileged Los Angeles party kids lost in a blur of apathy, sexual deviance and drugs. Just 21 when the book became a hit, Ellis joined Manhattan’s literary Brat Pack, notorious for its chilling irony and prodigious cocaine consumption. But it was his third novel, American Psycho, that provoked the global uproar that would attach the prefix “controversial” to Ellis’s name for ever more. The 1991 tale of a sadistic Wall Street banker who becomes a serial killer featured so much rape, mutilation, necrophilia and cannibalism that its