The Shards

SAM BYERS, THE GUARDIAN (UK)

"A genuine literary event ... Others before Ellis have attempted to retool the serial narrative for the internet age. Nothing has felt quite as thrilling as Ellis's year-long, hour-by-hour performance of The Shards ... Any lingering uncertainty that its brilliance lay more in the recitation than the writing can be dispensed with. The Shards isn't just Ellis's strongest novel since the 90s, it's a full-spectrum triumph, incorporating and subverting everything he's done before and giving us, if we follow the book's ingenious, gleefully self-aware conceit, nothing less than the Ellis origin story ... Superficially, The Shards cleaves to Ellis's well-established aesthetic. The dialogue is deadpan, the atmosphere paranoid and tacitly hostile. Sex is graphic and anhedonic; violence is lurid and sexualised. But beneath the coldness and carnage, a new, gentler quality is detectable ... We realise the precision and subtlety of its metatextual structure. The concluding violence is both climax and origination."