Like so many artifacts of the Obama era — affordable healthcare, social sanction for open racism, Katy Perry’s career as a hitmaker — the literary mashup craze is long gone. But loath, I’m sure, as author Bret Easton Ellis would be to admit it, there’s a touch of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to FX‘s The Shards, isn’t there? Autofiction inherently mashes together reality and unreality, but Ellis had already loosely fictionalized his youth in his debut novel Less Than Zero, the movie adaptation of which is referenced repeatedly by the show. (The big mountain of TV screens in this episode, for example.) Insert serial killers and cults into that preexisting mix, and you get The Shards, or as it might also be titled Less Than Zero and Halloween.

In this slyly funny second episode (part two of the show’s double-ep debut), narrator Bret introduces us to the idea that it’s not just serial killers who made Los Angeles a stalking ground in that autumn of 1981, but cults as well. With their similar M.O.’s — home invasions that escalate from nuisance to violence, culminating in murder — the cult of the moment, the Mansonesque “Riders of the Afterlife,” are suspected to be involved with the Trawler, the black-clad serial killer currently grabbing his fifteen minutes.

Encyclopedia Bret isn’t so sure. 

When his estranged hookup/boyfriend/whatever Matt Kellner goes missing, it’s not the cult that Bret suspects, despite the presence of one of their blood-red pentagrams on Matt’s Foreigner poster. (Lol.) The empty fish tank in the pool house where he’s lived independently of his nearby but neglectful parents for years suggests the Trawler. 

Or is it just Brett’s mad-on for Robert Mallory that’s leading him to suspect the solo artist over the collective? In this episode the tension between the two kids is right out there in the open due to Bret’s beloved Susan’s plans to throw Robert a welcome party. Bret insists Robert’s a liar because of the Shining thing (his friends must all think he’s insane) and dangerous because of his stalkerish behavior. When Susan divulges that Robert spent time in a mental health facility for depression, Bret’s suspicions only deepen.

Susan defends her new friend, noting that Bret did the stalking first. Indeed, Susan seems to be getting stealthily closer to Robert, who makes no secret of his desire for the girl when he and Robert have another tense conversation at an art opening Debbie invites both of them to. Robert describes what he wants to do to her with lascivious frankness; Bret all but flees from the scene. “She was gonna let herself get lost in his madness, and everything would get ruined,” he narrates with overwrought ominousness.

It’s also worth noting that Susan seems awfully close with their school’s Principal Croft (Cortés Alexander) — you remember, the one who keeps a photo of her on his desk. The way she sits while talking to him, her constant callbacks to her conversations with him, the doting way he praises her…suspicious, man, that’s all I’m saying. Meanwhile, the way Susan announces herself as someone the other students can turn to with info on Matt’s disappearance — listing herself before the principal and the faculty — is a Queen Bee bit worthy of Mean Girls.

Only we in the audience are privy to Matt’s fate, though I’m sure Bret can make an upsettingly good guess about it. Listening to a cassette he finds dropped off in his mailbox, he hears a recording of the killer (who’s right next to the Riders’ beach bonfire, though the rest of the cult is absent) feeding a battered and bloody Matt his own aquarium fish, then dosing him with enough LSD to make an elephant head into the studio and record Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. That’s a rough way to spend your final minutes on Earth.

Bret has other things on his mind besides killer cults and cult-affiliated killers, however. He takes his lunch meeting with Terry Shaffer, whose confidence about his open-secret bisexuality discomfits the young writer, who admits his perspective on sex isn’t “limited” but is not ready to go as far as the rich, glamorous older man with his Lindsey Buckingham perm.

Bret is also deluded enough to convince himself Terry’s really, truly interested optioning a book he hasn’t read a word of so that he can hire its not-quite-an-author to write the movie adaptation. I mean, come on, dude, you’re supposed to be the budding sleuth around here! Both Terry’s vaguely sinister assistant Steven and his alcoholic wife Liz (who’s emotionally abusive to their daughter, though Debbie gives it right back) appear a bit more with-it as to Terry’s true interests here.

Directed by frequent Ryan Murphy collaborator Michael Uppendahl, this episode lacks its predecessor’s copious film references and dreamy vibe. But it’s excellent at capturing the outrageous lives of hedonism, luxury, and unsupervised independence enjoyed by Bret and “the gang.” Drinking red wine in the hot tubs of houses blissfully unoccupied by parents might be a memorable evening for normal kids; for them, it was Tuesday.

The show’s deadpan cheesiness, meanwhile, is a hoot. The central-casting Satanic cult and its evil leader named (dun dun dunnnnnn!) Bruce (Gus Halper). Bret keeping a knife on his manuscript for self-defense. Susan narrating every detail of the Kellner family’s lives (Matt’s dad is played by an uncredited James Wolk) like she’s somehow the prosecuting attorney in his murder trial. Bret’s pretentious pronouncements about the perils of life in the Serial Killer Age…It’s funny! On purpose! 

It’s also sexy and sleazy and now and then creepy and occasionally, as in a striking composition that puts Bret’s face in the extreme foreground as Debbie does her makeup behind him, lovely. As is typically the case with Murphy ensembles, everyone in the cast appears to be having a ball with the material. I know I am.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.