Decades have passed since American prodigy Bret Easton Ellis made headlines as part of the “Literary Brat Pack,” a group of young novelists whose minimalist style captured the disquiet of the fast-moving 1980s and 1990s with icy precision. Yet Ellis’s work has endured. Delivered in his signature clipped tone, his cool analysis of extreme egotism and the unrelenting quest for instant gratification remains as urgent and vital as ever.

Adapted from Ellis’s sophomore novel, Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction (2002) captures the self-absorption of its yuppie characters, who come to life on the page through Ellis’s brutal and disaffected interior monologues. The film’s vivid images, frenetic style, and cool soundtrack offer a striking cinematic counterpoint—by turns comic, heartbreaking, and haunting—to the private misery endured by these lost souls.

In Ellis’s 1991 horror novel American Psycho and Mary Harron’s darkly comic film adaptation, the gap between psychological devastation and the pursuit of outward perfection is even more pronounced. Manhattan investment banker Patrick Bateman, forever associated in the collective imagination with Christian Bale following the actor’s transformative screen interpretation, pursues the kind of life that may seem enviable. Indulging in murderous fantasies to cope with his aseptic existence, his boundless vanity in fact points to a profound malaise—and it proves to be one of Ellis’s most provocative diagnoses.

Zeitgeisty to the bone, Ellis’s work was tied up from the start with that most popular art form: cinema. His adventures in screenwriting led him to pen The Canyons (2013), both a nostalgic love letter to Hollywood’s golden age and a savage takedown of the shattered dream factory it has become. Lindsay Lohan mesmerizes as the fallen angel in this digital neo-noir, directed by another master of inner turmoil, Paul Schrader. As stylish and sharp as they are unsparing, the films in our Bret Pack hold up a broken mirror to a society obsessed with beauty, pleasure, and fame. Be careful not to cut yourself on the glass.