Sherman McCoy, Where Are You?

By PAUL GRAY/

Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero and a leader of Manhattan's literary brat pack, has a novel due out next February that is already causing controversy. Staff members at Simon & Schuster who have read the manuscript, titled American Psycho, say it chronicles a young Wall Street banker who is involved in sexual perversities, murders, mutilations and diverse other grotesqueries and degradations. Robert Asahina, Ellis' editor, allows, "It is a book that can be at times upsetting to read." Some are so upset that they have balked at working on the novel. But Ellis has his defenders, one of whom calls the work, a tad redundantly, a bete noire Bonfire of the Vanities.

With reporting by DAVID ELLIS