25 years after Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis returns with Imperial Bedrooms, and we find ourselves back with protagonist Clay, now a successful screenwriter, returning to Los Angeles to cast his new film adaptation.

The hype around this novel has been bubbling away since Ellis re-read Less Than Zero as part of research for his 2005 novel Lunar Park. In 2009, he teased with ‘they made a movie about us.’ As ever, Ellis does not disappoint, no one captures the ennui and vacuity of the lives of the idle young rich better than he does, and, in turn, renders it so realistically or describes the level of dispassion the characters feel towards each other.

Clay has grown, but he’s only grown older, not wiser, not into a better person or a more rounded human being, just older. Now a successful screenwriter, he’s in L.A. to cast a film and finds he’s soon back in touch with the same long-distant group of friends as before. Blair and Trent are now married to each other, Clay is running a high-class, ultra-discreet escort service and Rip, their old drug dealer, a victim of plastic surgery described by Clay as “…like he’s been quickly dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed. It’s almost defiantly grotesque.”

The plot hinges around the cut-throat competition for the roles within Clay’s film and Clay becoming besotted with one aspring actress, who calles herself Rain, and may or may not be the person she says she is.Such is the world inhabited by Ellis’ characters – relationships are one-dimensional and hollow, everyones screwing everyone (in both senses of the word) and people are constantly inventing new ways to stave off the inevitable boredom which will be interrupted by another party or dinner date.

Critics of Bret Easton Ellis’ work have levelled the accusation that his novel lack plot and substance. I’m sure not even he would disagree with that, but fans don’t read his work for complex, intricate storytelling, we read it because he has become a genre all of his own and no-one does it better.

Reviewed by Scott Morris

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