Imperial Bedrooms

Twenty-five years after Less Than Zero, the debut novel that announced the arrival of the most controversial literary figure of his generation, Bret Easton Ellis returns with Imperial Bedrooms.

Named after the Elvis Costello album, Imperial Bedrooms picks up where Less Than Zero left off – only the young, blonde and tan inhabitants of Ellis’s captivating vision of LA under Reagan are now, post-9-11, post-Bush and post-crash, simply old, blonde and tan.

Clay, who in Less Than Zero returned for Christmas to become ‘the boy who couldn’t love the girl’, is back for good – and no longer content to merely ‘see the worst’. Bitter, twisted and at various stages of inebriation throughout, the grown-up Clay is now the centre of attention, shaping a series of, shall we say, morally questionable events to bring about the destruction of friends both new and old.

It’s compelling stuff, as much for the vintage Ellis moments – ‘showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all’ – as for the inescapable intimation that, like his narrator, Bret Easton Ellis is suffering through his own crisis.

Seemingly uneasy with his oeuvre and unable to escape his past, Ellis has written a sequel to the book that started it all. The result is the literary equivalent of reaching 40 and buying a Porsche – then setting fire to the one you already had in the garage.

It’s a bold move and one that few authors could pull off. But it still begs the question, what next?