Bret Easton Ellis was the crown prince of Gen-X shock. Then it all went wrong

Best read when you’re 13 and trying too hard, the ‘American Psycho’ author has largely fallen out of favour since his Eighties and Nineties heyday. A series of exhaustingly public calamities didn’t help. So why, amid the launch of a very expensive TV adaptation of his 2023 novel ‘The Shards’, does it seem as if he’s back in vogue, asks Adam White