Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist while still in college and almost immediately famous and wealthy, and then seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, even as your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs. Imagine having a second chance, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given.

Now married to the mother of his previously unacknowledged son and living in the suburban hinterlands, Ellis here recounts the unraveling of this new life. He glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character at his fateful Halloween party, and a car identical to his late father’s; his stepdaughter’s doll violently “malfunctions”, and their house undergoes bizarre transformations. Connecting these aberrations to graver events – a series of grotesque murders, and the epidemic disappearance of young boys – Ellis struggles to defend his family even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania.

Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting psychological and supernatural horror toward an astonishing resolution – about love and loss, fathers and sons – in what is surely the most powerfully original and moving novel of an extraordinary career.