Brett Easton Ellis is famously hard to please when it comes to screen adaptations of his novels.
He said American Psycho doesn’t “really work as a film,” even arguing that the movie’s success could be partially attributed to what he described as “woke” culture. In fact, of his four works that have been turned into movies, he has said that The Rules of Attraction was “the only one that captured the sensibility of the novel in a cinematic way.”
Thus, HBO’s upcoming adaptation of his 2023 novel The Shards will make for interesting viewing.
Of course, the project is helped by the fact that Ellis is acting as a writer on the series. He is also listed as an executive producer alongside Nick Hall (The White Lotus) and Brian Young (The Runaways). Young has previously worked as an executive producer on another Ellis project, The Informers.
The intriguing source material and HBO’s presence mean that The Shards is arriving with much anticipation. The 600-page novel was Ellis’ first novel in 13 years. The book acted as a fictional memoir for Ellis.
It was set during his final year of high school in 1981 and saw him and a group of friends investigating reports of a serial killer in their hometown.
It happens in the backdrop of early 1980s America, with all the excess you have come to expect from Brett Easton Ellis. Of course, this isn’t the first time the author has mixed fact and fiction, with his 2004 novel Lunar Park touching on the idea of mixing a memoir with a horror story.
The IMDBÂ synopsis for the upcoming show suggests that the adaptation of The Shards will stick to the style and tone of the original novel. It reads: “The Shards is part teenage coming of age, erotic thriller and exploration of the untamed and mysterious era of Los Angeles 1981, tracking a group of privileged high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.”
Up to this point, there are no indications of a release date, and no cast has been announced.
