Written by Bret Easton Ellis

Read by James Van Der Beek

12 hours on 11 (Jesus!) compact discs

$29.95

Lunar Park, on CD, begins with an electronic wash of blips and bloops that sound like an '80s porn soundtrack, during which we're informed that we're listening to a book written by Bret Easton Ellis, and read by James Van Der Beek. Mr., um, Beek seems to be a fan of Ellis's, having already starred in a movie version of Ellis's The Rules of Attraction, made back in the actor's heyday as Dawson, star of the show named after his character's Creek.

But time marches forward, trampling the young and famous, and Mr. Beek, no doubt, now wants to be Serious. He sounds as if he's smoked 28 cigarettes before each chapter and reads every single line as though it is Very Important. This is a problem when reading Ellis's prose, which is littered with parentheses and lots of "ironic" quotation marks. Dawson reads every parenthetical in the same casual-aside manner, and every word in quotes isn't read with irony, but rather "punched," as though Dawson were physically throwing "air quotes" in the studio, causing sound technicians to duck for their lives.

To his credit, Mr. Beek pronounces every word properly, including all the product names that waltz through the text (haven't we learned in the years since American Psycho that you can't toss ironic quotes around a Mercedes, that Commercials Will Always Consume Art?). If Lunar Park has to be read, this is the best way—by a former teen star who wouldn't recognize irony if it broke his face, and who is claiming to be a character named Bret Easton Ellis in a fictional memoir and just-foolin' mea culpa that turns into a disjointed haunted-house story. It's all so meta I could just about shit.