HBO is developing Bret Easton Ellis’ drama series The Shards

EXCLUSIVE: Bret Easton Ellis’s the shards which is both a podcast and a novel, is in the works for HBO as a drama series, Deadline has learned.

Ellis will co-write an EP with Nick Hall and Brian Young.

The shards follows a group of privileged colleagues in Los Angeles as a serial killer rampages across the city in 1981. The podcast appeared on Ellis’ Patreon last year, and Knopf published the book on January 17.

Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley Prep School when a new student with a mysterious past arrives. Smart, handsome, charismatic Robert Mallory keeps a secret from Bret and his friends, even as he becomes part of their inner circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is matched only by his increasingly disturbing preoccupation with the Trawler, a free-roaming serial killer who seems to be closing in on Bret and his friends and taunting them – and Bret in particular – with grotesque threats and cruel, bitter locals. acts of violence. The coincidences are strange, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gift for building stories from the threads of his own life will make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends – or his own mind – to understand the danger they appear to be in? Trapped by the world and his own innate desires, plagued by unhealthy fixations, he sinks into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the trawler and Robert Mallory spirals inexorably towards a collision.

The book is reminiscent of other tomes in the Ellis canon, read Less than zero which became a 1987 film starring Robert Downey Jr., Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz. The shards explores the emotional fabric of Ellis’ life through 17 sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.

Ellis is repped at LGNA by CAA, Brian Young and Jonathan Shikora.