Last tribe member, oil on paper, Marshall Arisman.

Henry Sutton’s recent Guardian feature on unreliable narrators in literature was a parade of my favourite authors and novels, and is definitely worth a read. Bret Easton Ellis was rightly among their number, and I made a note to excavate my copy of American Psycho and re-read the final chapter on an evening where weather, bank balance or hangover made my bedroom an attractive option.

On picking up my battered European edition tonight, I was struck by how powerful and appropriate the cover artwork is - just as I was when I first finished the book and performed the familiar closing ritual of savouring the story’s last word, thumbing despondently through the literary desert of empty pages that languish at the back of many trade paperbacks and, finally, turning the whole book over to look at the cover and title a last time before the story is put back to sleep on a shelf.

The commission must have been an easy one to make: Marshall Arisman specialises in distorted, tortured figures wracked with the darkest emotions and succumbing to violent transformation or scenes of carnage and their aftermath.