Thank you for this! I just finished reading Haruki Murakami’s famous novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Contained within its pages is a graphic scene of a man being skinned alive. I’ve never read anything so gruesome and viciously descriptive. But the scene takes place during World War II, so it is accepted as a part of that milieu. I completely agree with you that American Psycho is deeply connected to the realm we live in now. Brutality does not only exist in wartime.

The ultimate power must reside with the reader who always has the choice NOT to read a book. But to prohibit that choice, preemptively, invokes a different form of societal trauma: the homogenization of IDEAS.

My first book is about to be published, and there are things in it that I know people will not be happy about. I actively encourage those people, specifically, to read it—to force themselves to consider another perspective. I’m satisfied if it is rejected, so long as it is considered.

MichaelJaiGrant.com