Imperial Bedrooms [Hardcover]

'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

'Ellis is a moralist, engaged in a confrontation with "things like that", the things writers worry about, the question of "what else isn't real" in the social world they inhabit. In his ostensibly archly amoral books, he worries about the consequences of affectlessness, the instrumentalisation of human relations, the tyranny of the sleek surfaces that are his main cultural inheritance. . . Above all, he wants to know why - or rather when - people become monsters. At what point, at what threshold of pain or numbness does the human disappear?' --Financial Times

'Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms is his tautest, most compulsively readable work since American Psycho.' --The Observer

'Ellis, a self-confessed moralist, has suggested that far from offering a celebration of evil and of nihilism, he is presenting an examination of it. The nascent narcissist of Less Than Zero has lost all ability to empathise, switched off his humanity, and is now left in a 'dead end'. In that, it is a deeply pessimistic presentation of human nature as assailable, and in Clay's case, incapable of transformation; but also, perhaps, an unflinching study of evil.' --Independent

'As in Lunar Park, the deliberate blurring of fiction and reality seems both an attempt to increase the book's verisimilitude, and a sort of jokey way of making a book, which like almost all of his fiction, deals with hard-core material, seem even more sulphurous. . . Although American Psycho will always be Ellis's most graphic novel, Imperial Bedrooms is in many ways even more disturbing. American Psycho, Ellis always claimed, had a moral and satirical intent; Imperial Bedrooms is nothing but nihilism (not a criticism)...Imperial Bedrooms is a wonderfully merciless novel: where once was glamour we now find only horror.' --Sunday Telegraph

'Ellis writes effortlessly well. Sex, drugs and facelifts galore.' --Tatler

'Dark and tense, this tale of degeneration, murder and bleak emotional lives is sad and shocking. Easton Ellis's perspective is unchanged - hedonism does not equal happiness.' --Marie Claire

'Eason Ellis has pulled off another amazing feat, by opening another elucidating window onto a very modern and very hollow world.' --Daily Mirror

'Dark and tense, this tale of generation, murder and bleak emotional lives is sad and shocking. Easton Ellis's perspective is unchanged - hedonism does not equal happiness.' --Marie Claire

'Ellis has returned to the sparse, terse prose of his debit with startling effect. A timely expose of how shocking it is when nothing's shocking anymore.' --Big Issue

'The most pressing question to which Ellis tries to find an answer in this disturbing novel is why and when human beings begin to lose their soul, and how their humanity starts to disappear, bit by bit.' --New Statesman

'In the neon-lit corners of Easton Ellis Land, life is still defined by boredom and lubricated by cash. And even 25 years on, his characters will have a whole lot of growing up to do. . . It is shocking, powerful and incisive.' --Spectator

'Deeply noirish and at times shockingly violent . . . The American Psycho authors does not disappoint here.' --City AM

'Imperial Bedrooms is about more than mere creative megalomania, Its bleached-out surfaces, botched plastic surgery victims and morally anorexic characters reflect an uncompromising dead-end Gothic nihilism.' --Metro

'[Imperial Bedrooms] is a deeply pessimistic presentation of human nature as assailable, and in Clay's case, incapable of transformation; but also, perhaps, an unflinching study of evil.' --Belfast Telegraph

'A brilliant post-modern opening.' --The List

'More serious, more subtle and more sophisticated and with a more serious moral purpose.' --Tribune

'Gruesome but always gripping critiques of modern living.' --TES

'Imperial Bedrooms is a wonderfully merciless novel.' -- Sunday Telegraph

'What's most remarkable about this sequel is that even though a quarter of a century has passed since the first instalment, everything about is eerily timely and puke-out-loud pertinent. . . Imperial Bedrooms is vintage Bret Easton Ellis. It's nice, and sort of awfully at the same time. To have him back.' --Dazed and Confused

Twenty-five years on from Less Than Zero, we pick up again with Clay