Imperial Bedrooms - Hardcover

Easton Ellis, Bret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330449761 ISBN 13: 9780330449762

Publisher: Picador, 2010

Synopsis

In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis shocked, stunned and disturbed with Less Than Zero, his ‘extraordinarily accomplished first novel’ (New Yorker), successfully chronicling the frightening consequences of unmitigated hedonism within the ranks of the ethically bereft youth of 80s Los Angeles. Twenty-five years later, Ellis returns to those same characters – to Clay and the band of infamous teenagers whose lives weave sporadically through his – but now, they face an even greater period of disaffection: their own middle age.

Clay seems to have moved on – he’s become a successful screenwriter – but when he returns from New York to Los Angeles, to help cast his new movie, he’s soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his vulnerable former girlfriend, is now married to Trent – still a bisexual philanderer – and their Beverly Hills parties attract excessive levels of fame and fortune. Clay’s childhood friend Julian is a recovering addict running an ultra-discreet, high-class escort service, and their old dealer Rip, reconstructed and face-lifted nearly beyond recognition, is involved in activities far more sinister than those of his notorious past.

After a meeting with a gorgeous but talentless actress determined to win a role in his movie, Clay finds himself connected with Kelly Montrose, a producer whose gruesomely violent death is suddenly very much the talk of the town. As his seemingly endless proclivity for betrayal leads him to be drawn further and further into this ominous case it looks like he will face far more serious consequences than ever before.

About this title

Product Description

192pages. in8. Cartonné jaquette.

Review

'The cult author's brilliant, disturbing 1985 debut - about the empty lives of LA teenagers - was a literary smash at the time, and is being re-released ahead of next month's much-anticipated follow-up Imperial Bedrooms - a book that will be THE cultural ralking point of the summer. Read or re-read now.' --Grazia - The Barometer

'You won't read a better book this summer. Nasty but nice.'
-- Art Review

'Cunningly weaving his personal anxieties into this fictional story reminds us that, no matter how nihilistic and derogatory Ellis's work may seem, at it's core is a writer who is deeply concerned with the direction our culture is taking.' --HUH magazine

'The poster boy for `80's excess returns with this sequel to Less Than Zero. Twenty-five years on, LA's spoilt rich kids are all grown up but still embroiled in the debauchery of Hollywood. Here, Ellis displays a newly emotional and sinister tone. A creepy, brutal, absorbing read.' --Grazia

'In 1983, Bret Easton Ellis wrote Less Than Zero, pretty much the ultimate teen novel. In this sequel the same characters are just as wasted and rich. A frantic and funny glimpse of the darker side of Hollywood, it makes you ask, "Is this what it's like on The Hills?' --Heat

'In terms of American literary inheritance, Easton Ellis adds the playful self-advertisements of Philip Roth to the ambiguously complicit social reportage of F Scott Fitzgerald. Imperial Bedrooms ranks with his best exercises in the latter register, teeming with sharp details of a narcissistic generation.' --Guardian

'Densely, even hectically plotted. Carrying an epigraph from Raymond Chandler, it is a murder mystery - a woozy, paranoid, hallucinatory version of LA noir.'
--Sunday Times

'Imperial Bedrooms itself is almost defiantly appalling and sickening, but it is also brilliantly written and coolly self-aware...[it] has a thriller's pace and structure, drawing momentum from our desire to find out who is behind the hideous mutilation of a body displayed a few pages in. At the same time, like it or not, the novel dabbles in philosophical waters...Here, as in Less Than Zero, Ellis is plumbing the depths of human nature, exposing it at its worst. His writing is existentialist to the extent that it confronts the minimal limits of identity.' --Observer

'If you want to feel a whole lot better about your life, revisit Bret Easton Ellis's seminal Eighties' hedonists from Less Than Zero in the apocalyptic Imperial Bedrooms.' --InStyle UK Culture Club

'Ellis deserves his cult status and there is no sense of him going soft on us here. The wry dialogue, the brittle, heartless sex, and the sense of civilisation tumbling as the LA brat pack (now middle-aged) grab and fornicate are no less powerful . . . you won't want to miss this one.' --Readers Digest

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0330449761
• ISBN 13: 9780330449762
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192