However, Robert Asahina, the editor at Simon & Schuster who worked on Ellis’s first three novels, insists that he took the writing of the book very seriously. Many commentators thought American Psycho was a confected publicity trap designed to project Ellis back into the limelight. He had become a celebrity while still in college after his first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), a mildly controversial study of disaffected Generation X-ers, became a critical and commercial hit but the follow-up, The Rules of Attraction (1987) was conspicuously less successful.

When American Psycho was first published, Ellis was, at 26, widely regarded as something of a has-been. Although there is some suggestion that the killing sprees are merely Bateman’s fantasies or hallucinations, the book remains queasily ambiguous.

His victims include several men, a couple of dogs, and a five-year-old boy. One ought to note that the novel’s narrator, Patrick Bateman – investment banker, disciple of the business style of Donald Trump, fan of Phil Collins, and serial killer – is an equal opportunities sadist. A copy was passed around that fell open at certain passages in the way that Lady Chatterley’s Lover did for a previous generation: those in the know would invite others to read the passage involving an abducted woman and a hungry rat, and sniggeringly wait for them to turn green. My first encounter with the book, at school in the 1990s, was not exactly in a feminist context. Some feminists even risked the wrath of their sisters by pointing out that it was meant to be an exposure of the banal preoccupations of its era. Its admirers cite its unmatched insight into the mindset of a late-capitalist generation of American men that sees women as disposable accessories. Back in 1991, one feminist campaigner denounced American Psycho as a “how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women”. The fact that it remains in print – and has spawned a hit film and even a stage musical – will be seen by some as an indictment of the fundamental misogyny of Western society. Even Ellis himself, when I ask him about his most famous work, admits, “It wouldn’t be published today.”

Many people have found something almost offensive about the anniversary falling at a time when men are being asked to think urgently about how to make the world safer for women. The 30th birthday of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho is not a universal cause for celebration.

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