Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park is more fun than any novel he's written before, and it's easy to see why it's become one of the hot books of the summer.

A satirical pseudo-autobiography as well as a creepy paranoid thriller, the book glides like a fast dream and keeps you in suspense, even though you won't care a bit about the well-being of any of its endangered characters. Everything still all adds up to less than zero in Ellis's world, and that's the way it's supposed to be.

The book kicks off with a hilarious summary of Ellis's writing career and his emergence as one of three super-hot lit-darlings of the 1980's (along with Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney). He's bitter and funny as he looks back on all the parties he attended and all the celebrities he met, revealing that he remains just as callow, just as drug-dependent, and just as unenlightened now as he was then. But he recently got married, and trying to be a good stepdad to his movie star wife's 11 year old son and 6 year old daughter. This only seems to create a dark undercurrent of parent-anxiety, and images of Ellis's own dead father start to haunt him.

The book is packed with literary references that refuse to take themselves seriously. The Ellis family lives on Elsinore Lane and shops at the Ophelia Mall, hints so hokey that Ellis can only be inviting reviewers to sneer at them. The punchy sentences Ellis uses to advance the creepy underplot recall Chuck Pahlaniuk, while the use of the author as a character in an implausible criminal plot indicates that Ellis has been reading Paul Auster (the title of the book also echoes Auster's Moon Palace). Meanwhile, the family dynamic, complete with clueless neighbors and sweet corrupted children in an affluent college town, recalls Don DeLillo's White Noise.

Back in the 1980's, when the Ellis/McInerney/Janowitz trio ruled the party photo pages in Vanity Fair and Spy Magazine, nobody ever thought Ellis would emerge as the only serious writer of the three. In fact he seemed the slightest of the trio, and the least original. But McInerney and Janowitz, for all their good haircuts, have clearly stopped experimenting with either form or content. McInerney has tried to position himself as the F. Scott Fitzgerald of his age (supposedly we'll all appreciate Brightness Falls twenty years after he's dead?) while Janowitz has simply stuck to familiar grooves. Ellis, on the other hand, has made a career of twisting his rich party boy persona into one odd tortuous new shape after another, and in 2005 he seems to belong more to this decade than to that one. We don't exactly love his books, because that's not what the Ellis experience is about, but it sure is easy to enjoy this one.