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Summary
Summary
Bret Easton Ellis's debut, Less Than Zero, is one of the signal novels of the last thirty years, and he now follows those infamous teenagers into an even more desperate middle age.
Clay, a successful screenwriter, has returned from New York to Los Angeles to help cast his new movie, and he's soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his former girlfriend, is married to Trent, an influential manager who's still a bisexual philanderer, and their Beverly Hills parties attract various levels of fame, fortune and power. Then there's Clay's childhood friend Julian, a recovering addict, and their old dealer, Rip, face-lifted beyond recognition and seemingly even more sinister than in his notorious past.
But Clay's own demons emerge once he meets a gorgeous young actress determined to win a role in his movie. And when his life careens completely out of control, he has no choice but to plumb the darkest recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal.
A genuine literary event.
Author Notes
Bret Easton Ellis was born in Los Angeles, California on March 7, 1964. He attended Bennington College. In 1985, at the age of 23, his first novel, Less Than Zero, was published. His other works include The Rules of Attraction (1987), The Informers (1994), Glamorama (1998), Lunar Park (2005), and Imperial Bedrooms (2010). His most controversial book was American Psycho, a book for which he received an advance in the amount of $300,000 from Simon and Schuster, who then refused to publish the book while under attack from women's groups in regards to the content of the book. It was later made into a feature film.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ellis explores what disillusioned youth looks like 25 years later in this brutal sequel to Less Than Zero. Clay, now a screenwriter, returns at Christmas to an L.A. that looks and operates much as it did 25 years ago. Trent is now a producer and married to Clay's ex, Blair, while Julian runs an escort service and Rip, Clay's old dealer, has had so much plastic surgery he's unrecognizable. While casting a script he's written, Clay falls for a young, untalented actress named Rain Turner, and his obsession and affair with her powers him through an alcoholic haze that swirls with images of death, mysterious text messages, and cars lurking outside his apartment. The story takes on a creepy noirish bent-with Clay as the frightened detective who doesn't really want to know anything-as it barrels toward a conclusion that reveals the horror that lies at the center of a tortured soul. Ellis fans will delight in the characters and Ellis's easy hand in manipulating their fates, and though the novel's synchronicity with Zero is sublime, this also works as a stellar stand-alone. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Ellis' fame rests on such controversial novels as Less Than Zero (1985) and American Psycho (1991). His new novel is a sequel to Less Than Zero, which was a notorious insider account of young men and women up to their drug-hazed eyes in the hedonistic entertainment industry in Los Angeles. Ellis returns to those less-than-admirable folks to see what they are up to a quarter-century later, now that they have hit middle age. They haven't gained in moral stature, certainly; they are still narcissistic egomaniacs obsessively concerned with looks, who is sleeping with whom, and achieving fame and fortune with minimal work. One is a screenwriter, another is an actor, and another a talent manager, and so on every Hollywood type is represented. These are empty lives, and, unfortunately, this is an empty novel. These characters' issues seem trivial and far removed from regular people's lives, and it is Ellis' fault that the reader cannot summon any sympathy. His exploration of these individuals is as superficial as the way they treat each other. Sleazy sex and even torture and murder are stitched together into a somewhat compelling plot. Expect demand based on the sensationalism of the author's previous books.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AT first you think: That's a nice conceit. "They had made a movie about us," Bret Easton Ellis's new book begins, and of course, they did, allowing us at least an early glimpse of the genius of Robert Downey Jr. The movie, it should go without saying, is the film version of "Less Than Zero," Ellis's headline-grabbing 1985 debut. Neither the book nor the movie is named, but titles aren't necessary, for here are the old familiar names: Blair, Julian, Trent - and Clay, the narrator of that novel and this one, "Imperial Bedrooms," which takes up their stories a quarter of a century on. So there's a neat, postmodern, self-referential beginning, with Clay, the cool observer of his own actions and feelings - or lack of them - observing himself being observed, an acknowledgment that his version of the story may be only one of many. So what happened to all these people? Fair enough for their maker to be curious as to their fates. You could make a cynical argument that sequels are written for the most venal of reasons, to continue a franchise or revive interest in a flagging brand, and that's no doubt true if you're talking about, say, "Star Wars." But when authors create memorable characters it's usually because they can't help themselves. Imaginary people become lodged in the creator's consciousness; it can be hard to get them to leave. At any event, Ellis's work has always been stitched with cross-reference and self-reference, threaded through with a sense that the boundary between fantasy and reality is disturbingly fragile. It's what makes his work, at its best, so striking. I can well believe the haunted fascination that sparked off "Imperial Bedrooms." But the resulting novel falls flat. For what starts off neat swiftly becomes pat, lazy and effortful all at once. There is a story here, of sorts. "The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the soundtrack. The real Julian Wells was murdered over 20 years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location." So it's quite a conventional story, really: Who killed Julian Wells? That's the dime-store path the novel wanders. As in "Less Than Zero," Clay has come home at Christmastime. He is now a screenwriter, back in Los Angeles to oversee the casting of a movie he's written. "This is the official reason why I'm in L.A. But, really, coming back to the city is an excuse to escape New York and whatever had happened to me there that fall." That "whatever" is an echo of the weirdly vibrant nothingness that makes "Less Than Zero" such a startling, powerful book. Ellis's first novel has that "Catcher in the Rye," "Bell Jar" trick, the ability to make something from nothing, to let a willed lack of emotion stand in for emotion. It reveals the void at the heart of a culture obsessed by surface - a culture that would become ubiquitous. It was Ellis's gift, or curse, to know that it would. There are no cellphones in "Less Than Zero," and the Betamax machine is a thrilling new technology. But young Clay's Christmas break back home in Los Angeles now seems like a premonition of the pornographic emptiness that is almost inescapable today: online, on television, on your iPhone. The violence at the end of "Less Than Zero" is shocking; and it shocks Clay, too, though the most he can muster is "I don't think it's right." Nothing can shock Clay 25 years later. Does that surprise you? Are you, indeed, surprised that Julian ends up dead? No, I didn't think you were. Julian trying to wheedle money out of Clay to pay for an abortion in "Less Than Zero" becomes Julian who owes money to Blair ("Well, 70 grand, but for him that's a lot of money"). Nobody changes, not really. Rip, Clay's dealer, has had a lot of plastic surgery: "His face is unnaturally smooth, redone in such a way that the eyes are shocked open with perpetual surprise; it's a face mimicking a face, and it looks agonized. The lips are too thick. The skin's orange. The hair is dyed yellow and carefully gelled. He looks like he's been quickly dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed. It's almost defiantly grotesque." Like Martin Amis, Ellis still has a flair for such perfect, surreal description. But, again like Amis, he can struggle to set it in an effective context. The plot - the trajectory toward Julian's death, Clay's obsession with a girl who may or may not be called Rain Turner, the threatening texts he receives from blocked numbers that say things like "I'm watching you" - is a clunking machine. For all its zoned-out 21st-century accessories, it's as old-fashioned as something by Arthur Conan Doyle. "Imperial Bedrooms" is more violent than "Less Than Zero." It goes without saying, I suppose, that's it's not as violent as "American Psycho," but it is infused with the same toxicity. Toward the end of the novel, Clay buys himself a boy and a girl: "The girl was impossibly beautiful - the Bible Belt, Memphis - and the boy was from Australia and had modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch." He does terrible things to them, and makes them do terrible things to each other. Why? Maybe because, as the novel's closing line has it, "I never liked anyone and I'm afraid of people." Didn't we know that already? The reader has to wonder what Ellis is trying to prove. That people numbed by the poison of a society based solely on money, fame and beauty are capable of practically anything? If that's not news to us it's thanks, in large part, to Bret Easton Ellis. But what purpose can simple repetition serve? We, the modern audience for novels like this, have gotten over being shocked. There's nothing left. From "A Clockwork Orange" to "Antichrist," and with "American Psycho" along the way, we've seen it all. We too have been poisoned, so that when we see pictures from Haiti or from Abu Ghraib, they appall us, perhaps, but not for long. They are part of the landscape: they are what we expect to see, and we must blunt ourselves to their power if we are to survive as feeling human beings. That's not a call for a return to the past - for the veil of doubt cast over Tess Durbeyfield as she lies in a wood at Alec's mercy. Nor for the stark moralism Dickens suggests with the death of Bill Sikes, even his poor dog's brains dashed out in despair. But a skilled novelist, one who wants to examine the way we live and why, needs to move the conversation forward. The obligation is even greater if he's returning to a world he's depicted before. "History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats," runs one of this novel's epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn't have to: that's the point. Let's hope Ellis figures that out. Ellis's work is laced with the sense that the boundary between fantasy and reality is disturbingly fragile. Erica Wagner is the literary editor of The Times of London and the author, most recently, of the novel "Seizure."
Guardian Review
Graham Greene liked to claim that he had once entered a magazine competition inviting Greenian parodies and finished second. And you suspect that, if the Guardian's John Crace happened to be incapacitated while writing a spoof of Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms, the novelist himself could easily step in, although the result might be considered a little self-conscious. Certainly, few writers can have combined such distinctive literary mannerisms with such a strong awareness of their own effects. And, in his latest work of fiction, the sense of signature is increased by the fact that the book is a return to an earlier world: Imperial Bedrooms, his seventh novel, is a sequel, quarter of a century on, to his bravura 1985 debut, Less than Zero The tone of Less Than Zero was a zombified monologue, in which the narrator, a young, rich brat called Clay, described encounters with sex, drugs and violence in an affectless present-tense: "I'm sitting in my pyschiatrist's office the next day, coming off from coke, sneezing blood." This was a voice so strange and strong - depravities recited in the manner of a shopping list - that it immediately invited pastiche, some of it by Easton Ellis himself, who took casual amorality perhaps as far as it could go in American Psycho, an apologia by a serial killer which the original publisher declined to print. In Imperial Bedrooms, Clay has doubled in age but voice-recognition software would have little trouble picking up his tense present: "We sit in my office naked, buzzed on champagne, while she shows me pics from a Calvin Klein show." He occasionally seems, though, to have developed the syntactical ability to look back: "They had made a movie about us," the book begins. That opening mention of a cinematic version of the characters reminds us that Less Than Zero has been a movie and is an example of the energetic self-reference that has become increasingly a feature of this writer's fiction. Lunar Park, his previous book, was an extraordinary mock-memoir in the form of a novel, in which a drug-addled, bisexual American author called Bret Easton Ellis found himself being stalked by Patrick Bateman, the killer from American Psycho. That was not the only realistic/impossible detail, Easton Ellis's work being a form of striptease that sometimes involves garments being put on. The invitation to read the author into the protagonist of Less Than Zero and now its sequel is strong because, in addition to the first-person narration, Clay is deliberately a blank, a receptor for impressions of those around him. The narrative of Imperial Bedrooms more or less exactly mirrors that of the original - Clay goes to Los Angeles from New York for a passively hedonistic Christmas, although he now possesses not only money but a sort of influence, having become an outwardly successful screenwriter. But, as Easton Ellis's readership will immediately know, writers in Hollywood have no real power, being the playthings of producers. Clay is having frequent sex, fuelled by booze and junk, with an aspiring actress who calls herself Rain, whom he met at the first audition for a movie he's written and who seems to be hoping, by acquiescing to his pleasures, for a call-back to a second reading. Clay, though, does not seem to be in control of his own storyline: a stalker, whom we suspect has read Lunar Park, keeps sending him menacing texts in italics, mainly variations on "I'm watching you". The major additions to Less Than Zero are technological: the novel is dotted with texts and a character who goes missing appears to have been killed in an "execution video" on the web, although the link proves impossible to activate, leaving only "people on various blogs debating the video's 'authenticity'." The novelist is a laureate of paranoia ("ominous" is a favourite adjective), which usually proves to be justified, as it does here, in a climactic scene of sex and violence which suggests that self-censorship has not been a consequence of the American Psycho scandal. In terms of American literary inheritance, Easton Ellis (below) 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: the "spray-on tans and the teeth stained white", "the AA meetings on Robertson and Melrose, the twenty-dollar margharitas from room service", "young girls walk by in a trance holding yoga mats". Most tellingly, Rip, the young kids' drug dealer in the first book, is still offering the service now, although they fail to recognise him, not because of ageing but his cosmetic attempts to avoid it: "It's a face mimicking a face . . . he looks like he's been quickly dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed." Thankfully, Easton Ellis's literary face-lift to his youthful first appearance has been conducted more subtly, retaining what was initially attractive with a few tight injections of modernity. May the 2035 publication lists include a report on Clay in the third age, when he might need someone to do the sex, drugs and paranoia for him. Mark Lawson's Enough Is Enough is published by Picador. To order Imperial Bedrooms for pounds 13.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop [Clay], though, does not seem to be in control of his own storyline: a stalker, whom we suspect has read Lunar Park, keeps sending him menacing texts in italics, mainly variations on "I'm watching you". The major additions to Less Than Zero are technological: the novel is dotted with texts and a character who goes missing appears to have been killed in an "execution video" on the web, although the link proves impossible to activate, leaving only "people on various blogs debating the video's 'authenticity'." The novelist is a laureate of paranoia ("ominous" is a favourite adjective), which usually proves to be justified, as it does here, in a climactic scene of sex and violence which suggests that self-censorship has not been a consequence of the American Psycho scandal. In terms of American literary inheritance, [Bret Easton Ellis] (below) 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: the "spray-on tans and the teeth stained white", "the AA meetings on Robertson and Melrose, the twenty-dollar margharitas from room service", "young girls walk by in a trance holding yoga mats". - Mark Lawson.
Kirkus Review
A sequel toLess Than Zero (1985). Twenty-five years ago, Ellis made his popular debut with a slim novel that took its title from an Elvis Costello song. It concerned drug-addled young hipsters in Los Angeles and was widely perceived as the West Coast equivalent of Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney's novel about drug-addled young professionals in Manhattan. Ellis's sequel takes its name from a later Elvis Costello album, and the young hipsters have gotten older. Some of them continue to lust after young flesh, though that fleshlike drugs and talentis just another commodity in Hollywood, which may seem like a seller's market to those peddling their wares but may be more of a buyer's market, where supply (particularly for attractive young flesh) exceeds demand. Narrator Clay has become a bicoastal screenwriter, recently returned to Los Angeles from New York. He is either paranoid or the target of a great conspiracy. Or maybe he's part of that great conspiracy. In any event, the narrative meanders from party to party, where Clay encounters seemingly random characters, some of whom he knew in the first novel, until the randomness starts to tighten into a web. A young actress seems attracted to him, or what passes for attraction between a supplicant and someone who might do her career some good. But who holds the power here? And just what kind of guy is our narrator, anyway? "This isn't a script," warns his boyhood friend, Julian, who is also somehow connected with the actress. "It's not going to add up. Not everything's going to come together in the third act." This warning might be better directed toward the reader, who must determine whether another character's insight that "everything's an illusion" is profundity or clich. The novel is short, elliptical and sketchyeven jumpybut it feels like it takes forever to end.Don't hold your breath for act three.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
So what did happen to the disaffected L.A. teens of Ellis's premier novel, Less Than Zero? When we left them, they were adrift in drugs, sex, and aloof nihilism, unable to merge, as the clumsy metaphor goes, on the freeway. Now, 20-odd years later, Ellis returns to the Hollywood landscape with a new novel, focusing on the current predicament of these characters, who look like "old teenagers" and act just as frustratingly distant as in the previous work. There's no shortage of texting, strategic sex, and obsession, and the tone evokes the noir ghosts of Los Angeles past, with a cold wash of pale paranoia throughout. Ellis remains a singular voice-floating in the ether between critique and romanticism-and he does justice to his Raymond Chandler and Elvis Costello epigraphs. Whether readers can stomach the contemporary horror show that follows is another question entirely. Verdict Libraries already providing their patrons with Ellis's fiction will, of course, want to add this title to their collection. Those who have sidestepped his undeniable talent might want to rethink and fill in the gaps. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/10.]-Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few detailshad been altered and our names weren't changed and there was nothing in it that hadn't happened. For example, there actually had been a screening of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon, and yes, I had walked out onto the deck overlookingthe Pacific where the author tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were faked, but he was smiling as he said this and I had to turn away. Other examples: my girlfriend had in fact run over a coyote in the canyons belowMulholland, and a Christmas Eve dinner at Chasen's with my family that I had casually complained about to the author was faithfully rendered. And a twelve-year-old girl really had been gang-raped--I was in that room in West Hollywood with the writer, who inthe book noted just a vague reluctance on my part and failed to accurately describe how I had actually felt that night--the desire, the shock, how afraid I was of the writer, a blond and isolated boy whom the girl I was dating had halfway fallen in love with.But the writer would never fully return her love because he was too lost in his own passivity to make the connection she needed from him, and so she had turned to me, but by then it was too late, and because the writer resented that she had turned to me I becamethe handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness. That's how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That's how I became the boy who never understoodhow anything worked. That's how I became the boy who wouldn't save a friend. That's how I became the boy who couldn't love the girl. The scenes from the novel that hurt the most chronicled my relationship with Blair, especially in a scene near the novel's end when I broke it off with her on a restaurant patio overlooking Sunset Boulevard and where a billboard that read disappear herekept distracting me (the author added that I was wearing sunglasses when I told Blair that I never loved her). I hadn't mentioned that painful afternoon to the author but it appeared verbatim in the book and that's when I stopped talking to Blair and couldn'tlisten to the Elvis Costello songs we knew by heart ("You Little Fool," "Man Out of Time," "Watch Your Step") and yes, she had given me a scarf at a Christmas party, and yes, she had danced over to me mouthing Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?"and yes, she had called me "a fox," and yes, she found out I had slept with a girl I picked up on a rainy night at the Whisky, and yes, the author had informed her of that. He wasn't, I realized when I read those scenes concerning Blair and myself, close toany of us--except of course to Blair, and really not even to her. He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference,the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all. But there was no point in being angry with him. When the book was published in the spring of 1985, the author had already left Los Angeles. In 1982 he attended the same small college in New Hampshire that I'd tried to disappear into, and where we had littleor no contact. (There's a chapter in his second novel, which takes place at Camden, where he parodies Clay--just another gesture, another cruel reminder of how he felt about me. Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anythingin the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman's "I Love L.A.") Because of his presence I stayed at Camden only one year and then transferred to Brown in 1983 though in the second novel I'm still in New Hampshireduring the fall term of 1985. I told myself it shouldn't bother me, but the success of the first book hovered within my sight lines for an uncomfortably long time. This partly had to do with my wanting to become a writer as well, and that I had wanted to writethat first novel the author had written after I finished reading it--it was my life and he had hijacked it. But I quickly had to accept that I didn't have the talent or the drive. I didn't have the patience. I just wanted to be able to do it. I made a few lame,slashing attempts and realized after graduating from Brown in 1986 that it was never going to happen. The only person who expressed any embarrassment or disdain about the novel was Julian Wells--Blair was still in love with the author and didn't care, nor did much of the supporting cast--but Julian did so in a gleefully arrogant manner that verged on excitement,even though the author had exposed not only Julian's heroin addiction but also the fact that he was basically a hustler in debt to a drug dealer (Finn Delaney) and pimped out to men visiting from Manhattan or Chicago or San Francisco in the hotels that linedSunset from Beverly Hills to Silver Lake. Julian, wasted and self-pitying, had told the author everything, and there was something about the book being widely read and costarring Julian that seemed to give Julian some kind of focus that bordered on hope andI think he was secretly pleased with it because Julian had no shame--he only pretended that he did. And Julian was even more excited when the movie version opened in the fall of 1987, just two years after the novel was published. I remember my trepidation about the movie began on a warm October night three weeks prior to its theatrical release, in a screening room on the 20th Century Fox lot. I was sitting between Trent Burroughs and Julian, who wasn't clean yet and kept bitinghis nails, squirming in the plush black chair with anticipation. (I saw Blair walk in with Alana and Kim and trailing Rip Millar. I ignored her.) The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everything--allthe pain I felt, the betrayal--I couldn't help but recognize a truth while sitting in that screening room. In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn't disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereasthe movie was just a beautiful lie. (It was also a bummer: very colorful and busy but also grim and expensive, and it didn't recoup its cost when released that November.) In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the characterthe author portrayed in the book: I wasn't blond, I wasn't tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie's moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone's drug use and trying to save Julian. ("I'll sell my car," I warn the actorplaying Julian's dealer. "Whatever it takes.") This was slightly less true of the adaptation of Blair's character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group--jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalizedversion of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. "Be good to her," Julian tells Clay. "She really deserves it." The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must havemade the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room. As the movie glided across the giant screen, restlessness began to reverberate in the hushed auditorium. The audience--the book's actual cast--quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was becausethere was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material--surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality--had to be reshaped. The best way to look at the movie was as modern eighties noir--the cinematography was breathtaking--andI sighed as it kept streaming forward, interested in only a few things: the new and gentle details of my parents mildly amused me, as did Blair finding her divorced father with his girlfriend on Christmas Eve instead of with a boy named Jared (Blair's fatherdied of AIDS in 1992 while still married to Blair's mother). But the thing I remember most about that screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because inthe book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the lastten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a beat before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm treesas I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away. The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. The real Julian Wells was murdered over twenty years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment buildingin Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location. His head was crushed--his face struck with such force that it had partly folded in on itself--and he had been stabbed so brutally that the L.A. coroner's office counted one hundred fifty-ninewounds from three different knives, many of them overlapping. His body was discovered by a group of kids who went to CalArts and were cruising through the streets off of Hillhurst in a convertible BMW looking for a parking space. When they saw the body theythought the "thing" lying by a trash bin was--and I'm quoting the first Los Angeles Times article on the front page of the California section about the Julian Wells murder--"a flag." I had to stop when I hit upon that word and start reading the article againfrom the beginning. The students who found Julian thought this because Julian was wearing a white Tom Ford suit (it had belonged to him but it wasn't something he was wearing the night he was abducted) and their immediate reaction seemed halfway logical sincethe jacket and pants were streaked with red. (Julian had been stripped before he was killed and then re-dressed.) But if they thought it was a "flag" my immediate question was: then where was the blue? If the body resembled a flag, I kept wondering, then wherewas the blue? And then I realized: it was his head. The students thought it was a flag because Julian had lost so much blood that his crumpled face was a blue so dark it was almost black. But then I should have realized this sooner because, in my own way, I had put Julian there, and I'd seen what had happened to him in another--and very different--movie. The blue Jeep starts following us on the 405 somewhere between LAX and the Wilshire exit. I notice it only because the driver's eyes have been glancing into the rearview mirror above the windshield I've been gazing out of, at the lanes of red taillightsstreaming toward the hills, drunk, in the backseat, ominous hip-hop playing softly through the speakers, my phone glowing in my lap with texts I can't read coming in from an actress I was hitting on earlier that afternoon in the American Airlines first-classlounge at JFK (she had been reading my palm and we were both giggling), other messages from Laurie in New York a total blur. The Jeep follows the sedan across Sunset, passing the mansions draped with Christmas lights while I'm nervously chewing mints from atin of Altoids, failing to mask my gin-soaked breath, and then the blue Jeep makes the same right and rolls toward the Doheny Plaza, tailing us as if it were a lost child. But as the sedan swerves into the driveway where the valet and a security guard lookup from smoking cigarettes beneath a towering palm, the Jeep hesitates before it keeps rolling down Doheny toward Santa Monica Boulevard. The hesitation makes it clear that we were guiding it somewhere. I stumble out of the car and watch as the Jeep slowlybrakes before turning onto Elevado Street. It's warm but I'm shivering in a pair of frayed sweats and a torn Nike hoodie, everything loose because of the weight I dropped that fall, the sleeves damp from a drink I spilled during the flight. It's midnight inDecember and I've been away for four months. "I thought that car was following us," the driver says, opening the trunk. "It kept moving lanes with us. It tailed us all the way here." "What do you think it wanted?" I ask. The night doorman, whom I don't recognize, walks down the ramp leading from the lobby to the driveway to help me with my bags. I overtip the driver and he gets back into the sedan and pulls out onto Doheny to pick up his next passenger at LAX, an arrivalfrom Dallas. The valet and the security guard nod silently as I walk past them, following the doorman into the lobby. The doorman places the bags in the elevator and says before the doors close, cutting him off, "Welcome back." Excerpted from Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
