For many readers, the career of the novelist Bret Easton Ellis is the standard for mainstream literary stardom. The biopic writes itself: While still a college undergraduate, Ellis strikes it big with his debut novel, 1985’s Less Than Zero, an unsentimental stenography of disaffected, privileged young adults in swanky Los Angeles. It’s soon adapted into a movie starring Robert Downey Jr. and James Spader, which itself bears little resemblance to the book. Nevertheless, Ellis’s renown skyrockets. By the time he turns 30, he’s seemingly done it all: published multiple best sellers (American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction) filled with materialistic ennui, cheap sex, and lurid death; been mythologized as part of a literary “Brat Pack” alongside writers including Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz; rubbed elbows with celebrities of the music and film worlds; made lots of money (for a writer, at least); and become addicted to drugs.Regardless of how you felt about his work—and readers had all sorts of opinions—his success couldn’t be denied. “If you were not a supporter of the Brat Pack, you simply had to accept us anyway,” he writes in his 2005 novel, Lunar Park, which is narrated by a semifictional version of himself. Such white-hot notoriety was rare in his time, and it’s rarer now. While a book can become a hit in many ways, you’re only young once—and though we’ve all been told about the virtues of writers who labor away unappreciated until they finally get their moment, it’s hard not to be a little envious of the ones who’re able to enjoy their spoils before knee pain sets in. It didn’t matter that, when I finally read Less Than Zero after college, I thought it was a relic best left in its era—the work of a poser trying too hard to convince readers of his secret depth. Ellis’s early works felt too significant, too settled, for me to really say much about; disputing him would have been like arguing with a redwood tree.His reputation as a hedonistic provocateur made the release of his 2023 novel, The Shards, somewhat of a surprise, at least to me. On its face, The Shards is an autofictional murder mystery starring a teenage version of Ellis who, at the start of his senior year of high school, suspects that a new classmate is responsible for a series of gory killings around the school’s ritzy Sherman Oaks neighborhood. Novel-Ellis is working on an early draft of Less Than Zero, drawing from his own party-heavy lifestyle. The sensationalistic violence and substance-fueled navel-gazing—all of that sounds like a typical Ellis novel. Yet The Shards is not celebratory or defiant. It’s narrated by a much older Ellis, who looks back on his youth with regret and shame—about his closeted homosexuality, about his formative and long-dead teenage friendships—and rips apart his own mythos from the inside.Parts of The Shards read like they could have used a more punitive editor—it’s a little long, and Ellis describes himself as “keyed-up” a few too many times. Yet the book’s hefty length—594 pages in hardcover—is conducive to novel-Ellis’s obsessiveness as he combs through memories for hidden meaning and tries to identify each emotion he felt during this chaotic time period. “The facts from that fall were receding from memory but being seventeen actually became clearer to me emotionally,” he writes. “I realized I had needed this distance of forty years to finally begin writing the book.” Now, he suggests, he can admit that Less Than Zero was indeed an act of mimicry—that he’d copied that book’s numbed affectation from a classmate. The cynicism of his early work had put me off, but here he seemed weary enough to let down his guard and, perhaps, tell a version of the truth.The Shards has now been adapted for FX by Ryan Murphy, whose campy and provocative shows (Glee, American Horror Story, Feud) have helped define TV in the 21st century. In many ways, it’s a natural match. Murphy’s eye is consistently drawn to beauty, and to the machinations and aspirations of the rich. And though his scripts can be plenty outlandish, he knows when a performer should play it straight.The early episodes seem to preserve much of Ellis’s plot. We begin by meeting Bret (played by Igby Rigney), an aspiring novelist and senior at the prestigious Buckley School in Sherman Oaks. Bret has recently started dating Debbie (Hayes Warner), a bottle-blond socialite; along with another couple, Susan (Kaia Gerber) and Thom (Graham Campbell), they constitute a glamorous foursome. Beneath this picturesque front is a more complicated reality. Susan and Thom may look like the perfect prom queen and king, but she’s grown restless in their relationship. And while Bret is quietly in love with Susan, he’s also been hooking up with some of his male classmates and wondering how to take advantage of the fact that Debbie’s father, Terry (Wes Bentley), a well-connected (and seemingly gay) movie producer, appears interested in giving him his big break.These delicate dynamics are unsettled by the appearance of a mysterious new transfer student, Robert (Homer Gere), who looks like he walked right out of an Armani advertisement. Bret is transfixed by his new classmate and is convinced that he’s seen Robert before, at the movies, where he made an indelible impression. But Robert becomes strangely defensive about the encounter, and insists that Bret must have made a mistake. His denials and secretive behavior lead Bret to suspect that Robert is connected to the Trawler, a yet-unidentified serial killer who’s been targeting local teenagers. Bret’s obsession with proving his guilt slowly spins out of control.Gruesome deaths, a pulsing ’80s soundtrack, dramatic conversations about people’s hidden motivations—it should be fun, and it sometimes is. As Robert, Gere conveys an alluring darkness; you can’t take your eyes off him, and neither can the show’s characters. Gerber’s Susan is beautifully nonchalant, a quality that propels her into Robert’s arms. (Gere and Gerber are the respective children of Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, who used to be married.) And Jordan Roth is ridiculous but memorable as Steven, Terry’s assistant, who seems to be manipulating everyone behind the scenes.Yet Murphy makes a subtle tweak that changes The Shards completely. The novel is told from the first-person perspective, which allows an older Bret to constantly remark on the described action with the benefit of time and perspective. Here, that framing device is snipped entirely. Bret still narrates, but voiceover-Bret is not Bret Easton Ellis, the middle-aged author of American Psycho who’s now looking backwards. It’s just Rigney, who plays young Bret, speaking from a vague near future, and sometimes obnoxiously. “Kids today have it fucking easy,” he sneers, which is new writing.The elision of this metafictional narration is paired with a lot of new plot. Ellis co-wrote the first two episodes before being sidelined in a reported power struggle. (He has not promoted the show on his personal Instagram, nor did he appear at a glitzy launch party in July.) The other episodes depart drastically from the book’s structure. Murphy tacks on stray storylines: a dance competition on an American Bandstand–type local TV show, for instance, and a kidnapping plot involving a foulmouthed classmate who has what seems to be a form of Tourette’s. One episode has the characters monologuing at one another in Shakespearean verse while dressed in costume. The add-ons are tonally confusing and parceled out inconsistently. Some moments are played for show-stopping drama, only to be immediately abandoned. Other confrontations have the taste of corny reality TV, and the ’80s references are often played for laughs.A blunter way of saying this: The new stuff is awful, and a waste of time. The show expands Bret’s outer world at the cost of his inner life (and screen time, as Rigney disappears for long stretches), but that outer world isn’t very interesting. The novel’s emotions have been strip-mined, leaving only the surface tensions of vain teenagers. Many TV adaptations of literature miss the mark, because the visual medium isn’t always well suited to novelistic storytelling, which can be both wide-angled and highly internal. But this misfire bears a particular irony. Since Less Than Zero, Ellis has been trailed by critics saying his work is shallow and trades in shock value. The Shards show unfurls as if all of those put-downs were true, as though the book is little more than a collection of unsettling murders, great outfits, and hot people being mean to one another.[Read: The rise of CliffsNotes cinema]Two comments about the making of the show—both from that launch party—reveal something about what went awry. The first comes from Murphy, speaking about what drew him to the book: “I knew the songs, I knew the clothes, I knew everything because I had lived it. It was my time.” The second is from Roth, speculating on the show bringing about a trend revival: “Love Story got us our ’90s nostalgia, and Shards brings us our ’80s nostalgia.”The former comment is Murphy viewing The Shards as his story, not Ellis’s—a tricky approach for a book that’s so explicitly personal. The latter is, I think, deeply cynical about the point of a show like this. Even when The Shards invites us to laugh at its characters, it does so through the prism of “Weren’t the ’80s crazy?” The emotions are blustery, but not intimate; the narration has been edited for cool concision. In the book, novel-Ellis narrates about Robert: “The boy aroused something primal in me that I had never felt before—I wanted him immediately, I needed to be his friend, I had to make contact, I had to see him naked, I had to own him.” In the show, this confessional surge has been drastically pared back, keeping Bret’s messy feelings at a distance.Regret and shame, the novel’s animating sentiments, are not sexy; I’m sure the actors had more fun overindexing on the ’80s of it all. The end result, though, is the transformation of a great novel into a bad show, one that Murphy wants to run for two more seasons. Let’s hope not. Although Ellis is often nitpicky about adaptations of his work—he’s never come around to the wonderfully caustic movie version of American Psycho—he’s right to distance himself from this one. “It was nothing like the book,” Bret narrates in both the show and the novel, after coming out of a screening of The Shining. “I felt cheated.” It’s quietly tragic that the same thing has happened here.