LOTION KILLER SCENE
This page has, over the years, hosted fervid toasts to syphilitic sex pests, vainglorious turtle killers, bank-robbing plastic Buddhists, and, most recently, a psychotic baby whose confinement to fictional realms is all that’s preserving humanity from a global dictatorship. So it’s with no apology that, this issue, we focus on the anti-hero of a book containing scenes so sadistic its publisher, Simon & Schuster, dropped it three months before its release. titled its review ‘Snuff This Book!’. Women’s movements organised boycotts, shops refused to stock it, and its 27-yearold author — Bret Easton Ellis — received 13 death threats from people willing to carry out murder as part of their quest to shield the public from literary accounts of murder. “Some countries [deem it] so potentially disturbing,” wrote nine years after its publication, “that it can only be sold shrink-wrapped.”
