Who is the Trawler in The Shards? Bret Easton Ellis's novel never confirms it — here's what the series has shown

The Shards spends a 600-page novel and nine hours of television assembling a serial killer, then declines to hand him over. Both men responsible have now explained why, which is arguably more than the book does.

The setup is the same in both versions: Los Angeles, 1981, a 17-year-old named Bret Easton Ellis in his senior year at the elite Buckley prep school. A new student, Robert Mallory, arrives. At the same time a killer the press calls the Trawler is working his way through the city, and the two facts start to look related. Ellis published the novel through Knopf on January 17, 2023. The FX and Hulu adaptation, created and run by Ryan Murphy with Ellis, premiered August 5, 2026 and closed with its ninth episode, "Stairway to Heaven," on September 9 — Igby Rigney as Bret, Homer Gere as Robert, Kaia Gerber as Susan Reynolds, Hayes Warner as Debbie Schaffer.

The method is the one thing nobody disputes

The Trawler doesn't simply kill people. He runs a sequence first, and it 's the sequence that makes the book work:

• The furniture moves — a victim comes home to find things rearranged, slightly.
• The pets vanish — always before the person does.
• The calls start — hang-ups, timed to be noticed.
• Then the break-in — abduction, then murder.
• Then the assemblage — the body staged alongside what's left of the animals.

Matt Kellner disappears after his pets go missing and his furniture shifts, and is found dead with their remains. Debbie Schaffer gets the silent calls, then her horse is mutilated and killed, then she's attacked in her own pool. Susan Reynolds and Thom Wright — homecoming queen and king — are attacked by a masked man.

What the novel actually establishes

Robert Mallory is the suspect the book pushes hardest. He arrives as the killings escalate, he admits to prior psychiatric hospitalization, and he is sleeping with Susan behind Thom's back. He also dies during a confrontation with Bret, well before the killings stop.

The murders that follow are eventually claimed by people who describe them not as crimes but as sacrifices to Robert, whom they call "the God." That resolves the plot mechanics without resolving the question, because it leaves everything before Robert's death unaccounted for. Bret, meanwhile, is carrying a bite mark on his arm that matches the one left on Susan's attacker. Two decades later, Thom tracks down the now-famous novelist at a book signing and asks him outright whether he did it. Bret says no.

Every detail about the Trawler reaches the reader through a 17-year-old who is lying to everyone around him about almost everything else, and who is on a great deal of cocaine for most of the book.

The four readings that survive the last page

• Robert did it — the reading the novel dangles most obviously, and the one most readers discard on a second pass, because the suspicion tracks Bret's paranoia rather than the evidence.
• Bret did it — he does most of what he accuses Robert of doing, including stalking and lying, and the bite mark is the book's single hardest piece of physical evidence.
• Someone unconnected did it — an outsider fixated on Robert, with no link to Buckley at all.
• Nobody did it — the murders are largely Bret's invention, or a figure for his own fragmentation. Notably, almost nobody Bret raises the Trawler with seems to know what he's talking about.

What the FX series put on screen

Not the answer. The finale builds to producer Terry Schaffer going over a second-floor banister during a Halloween party and refuses to confirm who pushed him, routing Bret, Robert, Debbie, her mother, and Susan through police interrogation and leaving every one of them viable. Thom proposes to Susan. Susan becomes a target. The Trawler is never named.

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Critics split roughly down the middle: 56% on Rotten Tomatoes from 57 reviews, 55 on Metacritic. FX has not announced a second season.

Why neither of them would answer it

Murphy told The Hollywood Reporter in September 2026 that he and Ellis never discussed it — "We never spoke about that. We never talked about the identity of the killer" — and that the killer functions as a stand-in for something else entirely. The show is set in 1981, at the front edge of the AIDS crisis, and Murphy has described his own adolescence as one where intimacy was intertwined with death and trauma.

"The Shards is a whodunnit. But I really understood, 'Wait, why are people I love dying?'" — Ryan Murphy, The Hollywood Reporter, September 2026

For the record: Ellis co-created and co-ran the adaptation of his own novel, which gave him nine hours and total authority to settle the thing. He spent them not settling it.

Earlier we wrote: Before 'Star Wars': George Lucas' childhood and the dyslexia question