THE SUBURBS HAVE ALWAYS been angry fertile ground for American writers. Ever since the postwar boom, those green-and-pleasant subdivisions have been emblems of a kind of white-bread conformity. Read Cheever or Updike or, most especially, Richard Yates (whose l961 novel Revolutionary Road is the dark masterpiece of suburban entrapment), and you will find life in the ’burbs used as a means to explore that great American need to build little Utopias that fail.

Since 9/11, America under George W. Bush has witnessed the growth of an even deeper conformism, one that is simultaneously bound up with a neurotically fervent belief in that most dysfunctional of entities: the family. So it is not surprising that one of America’s most incendiary writers, Bret Easton Ellis, has turned his latest novel into a nightmarish suburban fantasia on American family values.

Ellis has always been regarded as the bad boy of contemporary American letters. In true fast-track style, he scored a huge hit straight out of university with an out-there rich-kids-in-despair novel, Less Than Zero, followed up with an out-there campus novel, The Rules of Attraction, and caused serious mischief with a highly inflammable work called American Psycho.

For those who have been in a closed order for the past 15 years, American Psycho was Ellis’s “theatre of blood” vision of consumerism in its most demented form. Narrated by Patrick Bateman — a Wall Street golden boy obsessed by labels and upper-echelon restaurants — it charted his progress as an unapologetic serial killer whose mutilation of his victims broke every rule of fictional propriety.

Ellis found himself accused of everything from misogyny to being one very sick bunny. But the book had its defenders (this writer being one of them), most of whom saw it as a satire of great audacity.

Given the frequently virulent reaction to American Psycho, it’s no wonder that pre-publication publicity for Lunar Park was of the “fasten your seatbelts . . . this is going to be a rough ride” variety. Or, as A. O. Scott noted in The New York Times: “I’m not sure I have ever encountered a novel as heavily defended as Lunar Park, which arrives surrounded by the rhetorical equivalent of moats, high walls and velvet ropes; an insecurity apparatus designed not to keep you out so much as disarm your preconceptions.”

Certainly, anyone expecting a journey down American Psycho way will be rather thrown by a novel which, at first, seems to be a faux-autobiographical work of self-loathing in which we follow a young novelist named Bret Easton Ellis who achieves early fame with a first novel and embraces the bitch goddess Success with a pharmaceutical vengeance. Not only does Ellis navigate the New York fast lane (with such fellow 1980s literary brat packers as Jay McInerney popping up in the storyline), but he becomes an object of intense media speculation and public interest/revulsion — especially after . . . wait for it . . . the publication of a novel called American Psycho.

But just when you think the novel is about to become an extended (albeit highly entertaining) exercise in navel-gazing, Ellis shifts gear. The narrator hooks up with a movie star named Jayne. Before you can say volte-face, he has left the metropolitan glitter for family life in the suburbs. Here, in a fictional corner of well-scrubbed Americana — Midland County — Ellis tries to settle down with Jayne’s two kids and his own 11-year-old son, Robby (the product of a brief fling). Soon enough, we discover the demons that lurk beneath the surface of this homogenised community and things fall apart. Teaching at an elite local college, Ellis begins a dangerous flirtation with a student. His marriage takes a dive and he finds himself negotiating the horrors of “couple counselling”. Children begin to disappear — and their hyper-protective parents become hyper-hysterical. Ellis is haunted by his dead father. Meanwhile, a facsimile of Patrick Bateman is stalking his community, replaying American Psycho-style crimes.

Just when you think that things can’t get weirder, a doll belonging to his stepdaughter begins to do very bizarre things.

Lunar Park shifts narrative gears with abrupt regularity — so much so that its flaws are readily apparent. The descent into horror is awkward, as is Ellis’s attempt to pirouette on a tightrope between suburban satire and supernatural menace. And when the nasty stuff arrives, it doesn’t unnerve you.

But there are a lot of ambitious ideas swirling around in Lunar Park: the way that we imagine lives for ourselves; the open wound that is the parent-child relationship; the dread that lurks beneath the veneer of quotidian existence. He’s terrific when it comes to modern parental manias — and the control-freakery that underscores the raising of children among the modern American professional classes. The domestic rows between Ellis and his wife — and their counselling sessions — are unnervingly spot on. And in his depiction of his haunted relationship with his dead father he demonstrates his ability to write with great emotional complexity and depth.

So what if Lunar Park doesn’t totally fulfil its ambitions. It is a very interesting ride by an always interesting novelist — and, as such, is one worth taking.

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