Is The Serial Killer In ‘The Shards’ Real?

Set in Los Angeles in 1981, The Shards follows Bret Easton Ellis (Igby Rigney) during his final year at an elite private school. But his seemingly perfect life with his friends is disrupted by the arrival of Robert Mallory (Gabriel Bateman). At the same time, a serial killer known as the Trawler is targeting young people across Los Angeles. And Bret becomes convinced that Robert is connected to the murders.

That's the premise of Ryan Murphy's 2026 FX and Hulu television adaptation. But the story becomes considerably more complicated once you know where The Shards came from. The series is based on the real-life Bret Easton Ellis' 2023 novel of the same name, and the book deliberately places a fictional murder mystery inside a version of Ellis' own adolescence.

Ellis really was 17 in 1981, really was a student at an elite Los Angeles school, and really was beginning to think about becoming a writer. Much of the novel's setting and emotional material comes from memories Ellis had been carrying with him for decades. The serial killer mystery is where that autobiographical foundation becomes total fiction.

So the short answer to "is the serial killer in The Shards real" is no. And the person the series is based on has pretty much admitted that. On his own website, Ellis describes the story as a "fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined," and that is a much better way of understanding the series than trying to link it to a real serial killer that may have existed in the ‘80s.

How ‘The Shards’ Is Based on a True Story (Well, Kind Of)

However, the fact and fiction distinction becomes less clear when you do a bit of digging because Ellis initially presented the story as fact. Before The Shards became a published novel, Ellis actually told the story on his podcast during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Each episode followed Bret and his friends as they became increasingly entangled with Robert Mallory and the Trawler.

At that time, Ellis even told The Wrap that the contents of his podcast were based on things that really had happened to him and his friends. "These things happened," he told the publication. "It's a story with a beginning, and a middle, and an end. And I was there. So there's an outline I'm following, and I'm trying to tell this as straightforwardly as possible, as much as my memory permits."

"In other words, I'm not making this up as we go along," Ellis added. "I already know what's going to happen, and where to end it." While that statement is enough to convince anyone that the Trawler is real, Ellis wasn't saying that every event in The Shards literally happened. He was explaining the relationship between his actual memories and the story he was constructing from them.

There was already an outline in his head, and he was revisiting something he had been thinking about for years. The eventual novel makes that distinction much clearer. The publisher describes The Shards as fiction and explicitly frames it as a mixture of the real and the imagined, which means the Trawler isn't a forgotten serial killer from 1981 whose identity Ellis is finally revealing decades later.

Ellis Needed Decades of Distance to Write the Story

According to Ellis, he had been thinking about The Shards for about 40 years before finally writing it during the pandemic. He had attempted the story before, but it never quite worked. In a 2023 interview with The Washington Post, Ellis explained that it all finally clicked when he stopped trying to tell the story from the perspective of the teenager who was experiencing it.

"Pretty much every time I finished a book, I would go back to The Shards," he told the publication. "It's never clicked, and then for some reason… it was being an old man looking back on these events with this kind of hindsight and the ability to fill in all of the backstories of these people. This was the key to the lock," he continued.

That explains why the book and the television series spend so much time on things that are unrelated to the serial-killer arc. Bret's sexuality, his friendships, his jealousy, his fascination with Robert, and his attempts to understand the people around him are not just distractions from the Trawler storyline. Those are the parts of the story with some truth to them.

The Trawler murders just give those memories a fictional structure that allows Ellis to turn his own memories of a particular time in his life into a thriller. That's probably why The Shards can make a fictional serial killer feel as though he's been hiding inside a real memory all along. Therefore, the book, and by extension the series, can seem like a sort of real-life reveal when it's not.