Imperial Bedrooms

In this follow-up to his bestselling debut novel, Imperial Bedrooms sees Bret Easton Ellis reuinite with the privileged teenagers of his debauched Los Angeles, as they enter middle age.Clay is a successful screenwriter, middle-aged and disaffected; he’s in LA to cast his new movie. However, this trip is anything other than professional. Soon, he's drifting through a louche and long-familiar circle – a world largely populated by the band of infamous teenagers first introduced in Bret Easton Ellis's first novel Less Than Zero. 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 degenerate reverie is interrupted by a violent plot for revenge, his seemingly endless proclivity for betrayal and exploitation looks set to land him somewhere darker and more ominous than ever before.

A murder mystery – a woozy, paranoid, hallucinatory version of LA noir., Brilliantly written and coolly self-aware . . . Here, as in Less Than Zero, Ellis is plumbing the depths of human nature, exposing it at its worst., The novel is a kind of modern noir and, as in Chandler, the form’s accepted master, atmosphere is king. Paranoia prevails.

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of several novels, including Imperial Bedrooms, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama and Lunar Park, and a collection of stories, The Informers. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho and The Informers have all been made into films. His first work of non-fiction, White, was published in 2019. He is the host of the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast available on Patreon. He lives in Los Angeles.