SOURCE: "Flopsy, Mopsy, Paul, Sean and Lauren," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 13, 1987, pp. 3, 8.

In the following review of The Rules of Attraction, Eder critiques Ellis's style and examines the author's themes.

Bret Easton Ellis' characters have an odd resemblance to Beatrix Potter's.

True, they drink, get high, get tranquilized, spend a great deal of their parents' money, and practice junk-food sex. The comparison with the chaste Miss Potter may seem farfetched. Furthermore her rabbits and squirrels are more human than Ellis' college kids, and livelier.

But the resemblance is there. Both groups live snugly in burrows, do their things, pay each other visits, and have infrequent contact with the outside world. Adults appear rarely, and, when one does, it is a Mr. MacGregor, whose vegetable patch is briefly and perilously raided (Ellis' is a rich parent appearing now and then to moo and be milked). Afterward...