What happened to Matt in The Shards? The book’s answer is somehow more horrifying

*Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Shards premiere and the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Some may find this content distressing*

Ryan Murphy’s TV adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ autofictional novel The Shards has premiered, with the first two episodes culminating in a truly gruesome sequence involving Bret’s (Igby Rigney) friend and secret lover, Matt Kellner (Owen Painter). 

As expected from an Ellis adaptation, there’s plenty of drugs, sex and ‘80s aesthetics. The series, like the book, is a fictionalised retelling of the author and his friends’ final year at the prestigious Buckley School in LA in 1981. 

In this version of events, his life is upended when the mysterious new student Robert Mallory (Homer Gere) joins the school for his final year, and it just so happens to coincide with the rising violence of a serial killer known as the Trawler. 

The killer has a very gruesome MO: they abduct, kill and mutilate household pets, incorporating their remains into horrifying displays alongside the human victims. In the days leading up to the attacks, victims receive a string of silent phone calls. And that’s exactly what happens to poor Matt. 

What happens to Matt at the end of The Shards episode two?

Following his disappearance, Bret receives a mysterious tape outside his house brandished with nothing but his name. We soon learn it’s the audio of the Trawler torturing Matt. The show cuts between Bret listening to the audio and visuals of what happened to Matt. 

We see the Trawler forcing him to eat his pet fish, which were stolen from his house days prior. The killer then gets a bottle of pure LSD, fills a syringe with it and injects it into his victim, who has already been badly beaten and is covered in bruises and cuts. 

Immediately, Matt’s out of it and starts mumbling, “God… light.” The killer then demands, “Eat them,” which is breaking point for Bret. Realising what he’s listening to, he takes off the headphones and runs to the bathroom to vomit. 

The episode ends there, meaning we don’t know whether Matt is dead yet or not. Even though this is only episode two, the tap scene unfolds much later in the book, around two thirds of the way through. 

Before we go any further, if you haven’t read the book and don’t want to know about Matt’s fate (or you can’t stomach gore), look away now…

Matt’s horrifying fate in The Shards book explained

Similarly to the novel, Matt first begins experiencing the Trawler’s calling card: silent phone calls where someone simply breathes down the line, disappearing pets and other unsettling signs.

He then disappears without anyone immediately realising anything is wrong. A few days later, his brutally mutilated body is discovered floating in the family’s swimming pool. 

The authorities quickly construct a sanitised version of events, publicly claiming Matt died accidentally after taking a large amount of drugs and falling into the pool.

Bret later goes to see Matt’s father, Ronald Kellner, who shows him gruesome images of the crime scene. “The first thing I saw was a body, carefully positioned, lying by the pool on a sheet, drowned, naked, the penis shrunken into nothingness,” the passage reads. 

Bret describes the many injuries all over Matt’s body, including his left arm, which he describes as “gashed open, the wound wide and pink, deep enough so you could see muscle and sinew.”

In the final photo – the only of Matt’s face – he’s said to have an almost peaceful look on his face, which Bret juxtaposes with the description of another gash where the “skin had peeled off and you could clearly see the white bone of his scalp.”

But as is often the case in the author’s writing, it’s what is going on in the character’s mind that’s more disturbing. Bret notes a sense of arousal at seeing the images. At the same time, he felt so “horrified” that he “became paralysed”, describing the images as “traumatic.”

“One part of my life was now over and I had entered into another world,” he wrote. 

Closer to the end of The Shards, Bret receives an anonymous envelope filled with Polaroids. The collection is a series of images of himself and Matt, but it’s the last one that will send shivers down your spine. 

It’s of Bret’s missing dog Shingy in an empty room with the hair around his neck shaved off. As he inspects the image closer, he realises “one of his eyes is missing and someone had cut off his tail.”

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Featured image credit: FX