Who was the killer in The Shards? The biggest clue is the murder that happened after Robert died
Bret Easton Ellis's The Shards — published in January 2023, his first novel in 13 years — runs to roughly 600 pages of 1981 Los Angeles, narrated by a 17-year-old Buckley prep school senior called Bret while a serial killer dubbed the Trawler stalks the city. If you finished it still asking who the killer actually was, you're not alone.
Spoilers ahead, obviously — and the answer is slipperier than you'd like.
What the Trawler does
The pattern is pure nightmare fuel. Victims — mainly teenage girls — first find their furniture mysteriously rearranged. Then their pets vanish. Then come the hang-up phone calls, the abduction, and finally the bodies, mutilated and arranged with the dead pets into grotesque "assemblages". The press links the killings to a satanic cult, the Riders of the Afterlife.
Why Bret blames Robert
Robert Mallory arrives at Buckley that autumn — handsome, rich, and hiding a stint in a psychiatric facility. Bret becomes convinced he saw Robert at a cinema in 1980, convinced he's lying, convinced he's the Trawler. When police find a victim's remains at the Benedict Canyon house belonging to Robert's uncle, Bret briefly becomes a school celebrity for catching a serial killer.
Then Robert dies. After the masked home invasion that leaves Thom and Susan brutalised, Bret breaks into Robert's home, fights him with a knife, and Robert goes off the balcony. Bret tells the authorities it was suicide.
The murder after Robert died
This is the clue that unravels everything. With Robert dead, the Trawler kills again — and sends the police a note. Robert was never the Trawler. The murders, the note claims, were sacrifices offered to Robert, whom the killer worshipped as a god. The note denies any involvement in the attack on Thom and Susan, declares this final killing the last, and then — silence. The Trawler is never caught, never named. Bret's story collapses, and his reputation with it.
So who attacked Thom and Susan?
The book's darkest suggestion sits in a hospital room: Susan notices a bite mark on Bret's arm — in the exact spot where she bit the masked intruder. The narrator telling you this story is the prime suspect in its worst unsolved crime. Robert had warned him, in one of the novel's most quoted lines:
"When you talk to me you're really talking to yourself, dude."
The answer, then
Nobody. Ellis never identifies the Trawler, deliberately — the same trick that keeps American Psycho arguments going 35 years on. The one killing the book confirms beyond doubt is Bret's: Robert, off the balcony, at the hands of the boy who was sure he'd found the monster.