THE PREPOSTEROUS BOLLOX OF THE SITUATION

The next morning they filmed the scene for real. Deen came to life; throwing the negligée-wearing Lohan hard to the ground and pounding his fist into a wall with such fury I wondered if he had broken his hand. Lohan lay slumped on the floor, her hands guarding her face, shoulders shaking, tears pouring down her cheeks. Between takes, she listened to Ryan Adams’s cover of “Wonderwall.” After three shots, Schrader said he was satisfied, and Lohan fumbled for a cigarette. She headed downstairs, and someone complimented her work.

“Well, I’ve got a lot of experience with that from my dad.”

She didn’t elaborate, and no one asked.

Behind the scenes on Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader’s micro-budget movie The Canyons.

What sets these texts apart, however, from standard crime fiction is that neither adheres to traditional investigative frameworks and are even almost totally devoid of investigative narrative, because they ‘stay within the mind of the killer’ in such a way that makes them ‘effectively disturbing’. To an extent, there is really no moral voice that balances out the serial killer’s viewpoint or mind in either American Psycho or The Killer Inside Me. At least, especially not in the same way that Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot might, because narrative is totally subjective for Patrick and Lou and restricted to the subjective and ‘disordered imagination.’