“It might well have been otherwise, for even if [he] was bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely of his work has felt this.”
—George Orwell
I knew after last year’s revelation that I had read only one work of fiction that something would have to change. I used to read much more of it before History Impossible came around. And by a stroke of mere luck, only one day after I wrote the post detailing what I read in 2022 (which you can read here), I saw that the release date for Bret Easton Ellis’ new book, The Shards, was only weeks away. I had known that there was something coming from Ellis in the near future, but I had let it slip my mind (thanks a lot to, again, History Impossible duties). I couldn’t resist clicking the “pre-order” button on the Amazon page when I saw just how close the release date was.
People who know me personally or have known my literary opinions for a long time won’t be surprised by this, but I should make it very clear: I never pre-order things. Or at least very rarely. The last thing I can recall pre-ordering was 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077, and gamers among my readers don’t need to be reminded how that went (and for those of you who aren’t familiar, well…). Needless to say, pre-orders are a form of gambling: you pre-order something assuming you’re going to like what you get, and frankly, even when you trust who’s making the thing you’re ordering (as I did with Cyberpunk 2077), you can still get very burned. I didn’t have that worry with Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards. Not because I knew anything about it that others didn’t. I knew as much as I’d heard on the snippets he’d released to the public on his podcast that weren’t behind a paywall; in fact, I wasn’t a patron of his, so I hadn’t heard nearly as much as his supporters, who had been consuming this book for years at that point, as he released the book in a serialized audio format (a very cool, Bret Easton Ellis-esque touch to which we’ll return later). Not to further bury the lede of this introduction, I trusted that whatever it was Ellis was putting out, I wasn’t going to regret it; I’ve always known that even if I didn’t like something he wrote that much, it was always going to be something I found interesting and compelling.
You see, I’ve been a fan of Bret Easton Ellis’ work since I was 16, when I first saw Mary Harron’s excellent film adaptation of his most notorious book, American Psycho. From there, it was only natural for me to dive into the actual literature written by the man himself, starting with what has obviously been his most controversial work. After purchasing a copy from a Border’s Books in south Minneapolis, I began to read it, mostly surreptitiously in school, where I’m 99% sure I would have had it confiscated if any of my teachers recognized it and/or known about its contents. And as objectively stomach-churning as some of the contents of that book are, I knew I had found something unique in the world of literature and I became an honest-to-god, decades-long fan.
This was made all the more strong when, in the fall of 2005, I had the privilege of meeting Ellis. I hadn’t yet purchased a textbook for one of my history courses—global studies from 1950-2000, if memory serves—and grumbling about having to walk all the way to the other side of the Mississippi River to reach the student bookstore, I made my way across the chilly University of Minnesota campus. Annoyed as I was, I reached the bookstore and immediately saw something catch my eye: a sign that read, “Want to meet Bret Easton Ellis?” followed by that very same day’s date and the address of that very same bookstore. I had just so happened to arrive about 30 minutes before Ellis was due to speak, read from his newest (and in some ways, weirdest) book, Lunar Park, answer questions, and sign copies. The reading went as most readings went, Ellis was his usual chill-but-funny self, and the signing—which, in another amazing coincidence, I was able to take part in, thanks to having my copy of Lunar Park in my backpack—was excellent, and I have that signed copy to this very day.
But as much as Ellis’ work has impacted me, I think it’s necessary to look at the much wider impact his work has had on the culture itself, which, perhaps paradoxically, comes from Ellis’ own observations about that culture. As cringe as this statement might be to many—Ellis most likely included—Bret Easton Ellis has been, to my mind, the ultimate post-modern force in not just literature, but culture itself, if only because of how long he’s been at it. How much of what he says in public is honest-to-goodness-true or just another form of autofiction, we really will never know; it’s up for interpretation. But we always know his feelings at particular times of his life and, thus, times in our culture’s history, since those feelings are never far-removed from the world to which they’re reacting. That we’ve been along for the ride with Ellis, really since he was 18 back in the early 1980s, makes his voice all the more unique among his peers. And the value contained within that voice comes from the simple fact that he’s always been willing to project images onto the screens of our minds and force our eyes open, A Clockwork Orange-style, to look upon the parts of our culture—and our psychologies—that we really want to pretend aren’t there.
I. Youth
“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles,” is a hell of a way to begin a novel, much less an entire literary career. It’s evocative and produces, above all else, a vibe. And as it turns out, that’s really what Bret Easton Ellis was going for when he finally finished the book that would become his first, Less Than Zero (a title that already produces this vibe on its own, despite it being taken from an awesome Elvis Costello song). And that vibe—the tone—as Ellis has been describing it lately is one of pure numbness. In fact, as he said in a semi-recent UK interview promoting The Shards, he wanted to explore numbness as an emotion itself. This, to put it bluntly, succeeds and, I suspect, is a major core of why a first novel from a 21-year-old author from the hippie-dippie grade-less Bennington College was such a runaway success.
Despite its gloweringly numb tone throughout, Less Than Zero has got a pervasive sense of nostalgia coursing through its 208 pages. However, it’s clearly the kind of nostalgia one can only feel when they are in their early 20s; a preemptive nostalgia one knows they will experience in the decades to come but can’t quite articulate in those past-tense terms. Ellis was clearly perceptive enough in his late teens and early 20s to know that whatever “it” was, “it” was receding toward the horizon in the proverbial rear-view mirror. One requires a deftness of emotional perception to tap into such a sensation while also practicing a vibe of such true, emotional numbness. What Ellis achieved with Less Than Zero is making the ongoing theme of numbness so pervasive that it, ironically, brings forth a wellspring of feeling. Hence, the nostalgia one feels at various times throughout the book, whether through the flashbacks in italics of Clay’s time spent in Palm Springs with his problematic family, or through the simpler, present tense scenes, such as the one where Clay revisits his old elementary school. The shocking violence and depravity that punctuate the book—ranging from a snuff film viewing party to a gang rape of a preteen girl—both serve as foreshadowing for where Ellis would take his writing in the coming decades and, in a way, as an emotional anchor—a reminder of just how truly numb—and thus devastatingly sad—the world and mind of our narrator Clay truly is.
The numbness of the Los Angeles featured in Less Than Zero carries directly into its follow-up, The Rules of Attraction, which can best be summed up as Bret Easton Ellis’ “college drama,” and, in a lot of ways, the most unlike many of his other books that have been released over the years. In fact, tonally, it’s even more similar to The Shards than any of the other books in the Ellis bibliography. Despite a couple instances of gay encounters and suggestions in Less Than Zero, it’s also the first time Ellis had anything published that dealt frankly—if in a roundabout way—with his own homosexuality, something he kept deviously vague for another two and a half decades (living in “a glass closet,” as he liked to put it). In reality, however, if we’re to go the route Ellis has been suggesting we take of late—that is, seeing all of his novels as windows into his psyche at particular points in time—The Rules of Attraction allows us a window into the different aspects of his personality, as he saw it, during his time in college and immediately afterward. Thanks to the shifting perspectives—primarily between the three main characters of Sean, Lauren, and Paul—we’re made privy to Ellis’ intelligent, rage-filled sensitivity (with Paul), his disconnected numbness (with Lauren), and the darkest, id-driven and antisocial parts that inhabit all of us (with Sean).
Other characters—including Clay from Less Than Zero, and Sean’s brother, the infamous Patrick Bateman—serve as foils to these anti-heroes of sorts, but build the world around us in very personal ways, immersing us in the debauched fluidity of youth, especially on a small New England liberal arts campus in the mid-1980s. It’s Ellis’ take on the Robert Altman film: a sprawling-yet-intimate ensemble piece complete with overlapping dialogue, but with what was becoming the distinct Ellis vibe of numb detachment. Themes of numbness and alienation pervaded throughout the book—brought beautifully to life by Roger Avery’s 2002 film adaptation, it should be noted. But it wouldn’t be until Ellis had his alma mater of Bennington College distant in the rearview mirror and had been living among people whose own abject depravity inspired him to look at what was depicted in his first two books, and promptly tell himself to “hold my beer.”
II. Nightmare
Martin Scorsese’s 2013 masterpiece The Wolf of Wall Street made the degenerate lifestyle of a Yuppie of late 1980s Wall Street look fun and hilarious, if decidedly degenerate. Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 masterpiece American Psycho made it look like an utter nightmare (and not necessarily in the ways you’d expect). However, I wasn’t fully able to appreciate this when I first read it in my senior year of high school, which, if you’ll recall, was something I was very careful to conceal from my teachers. This is worth dwelling on because it not only helps explain the power of this book, but the power of Ellis’ work in general, especially for the young, post-modern-inclined hipster wannabe (which I won’t try to pretend I wasn’t in my youth or am not today).
See, my attempts to conceal the book I was reading gave the book an “edge”—one it hardly needed, considering what occurs on some of those pages—that made even owning it a bit of a fashion statement, and those among my friend group who knew and loved the film granted me my first taste in, well, authority of taste. This amounted to a realization that has taken me nearly two decades to appreciate that to be a fan of certain things—edgy literature, in this case—acts as a substitute for a personality. Since a personality is something typically none of us actually possesses when we’re still in high school, this is fine, but it becomes easier to identify as you continue through adulthood and begin to distinguish between those who shed this tendency and those who cling to it. While enjoying American Psycho in particular—and Bret Easton Ellis’ work in general—is not a very good substitute for a personality, it is a truly thrilling area of literary interest. Put simply, Ellis’ work is a conversation-starter and thanks to its insights, it manages to be a particularly good one (provided you’re not speaking to one of the people who tried to have American Psycho pulped or have Ellis killed for its contents). This is why it looms so large among an already-impressive literary catalog.
There are two noteworthy introductions in the opening pages of American Psycho: the first is a distinct lack of an introduction of our narrator, and the second is the cruelty of the world he inhabits. It’s not until the fifth page that the narrator, Patrick Bateman, officially announces himself to the reader by using the “I” pronoun; up until that point, it was a cavalcade of monologuing by Timothy Price, one of the other characters in Bateman’s orbit, with the occasional, sometimes laughter-inducing interjection from Bateman (e.g. “I don’t think dyslexia is a virus”). This lack of agency on the part of the narrator gives off a disconnected, unreal and yet objective vibe, a contradiction that is meant to stay with us throughout the story. The second introduction is the cruelty on display through Price’s own monologue, as well as his mean mockery of the homeless peppering the streets of Manhattan as they make their way to their posh destination. These two introductions serve as an explanation of the warning given in the very first lines of the novel: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” and as further warning of the world we are about to inhabit for 400 pages. Because it does indeed spiral into a nightmare that goes deeper than the gore-soaked scenes.
Where Mary Harron’s film adaptation of American Psycho paints a pointed and incisive feminist critique of the Manhattan finance bro of the 1980s (as well as a broader critique of the “less dead” among us; that is, prostitutes and broader still, women), Bret Easton Ellis paints a much broader and perhaps even darker indictment. That is, of the world at large during this time and at this place. At one point, a little more than halfway through the novel, Patrick Bateman commits his first grisly murder against a woman, namely his college ex-girlfriend. Without dwelling on the actual details of the murder in question, at one point during the ordeal (or “her life reduced to nightmare,” as he describes it at one point), Bateman throws open the windows of his apartment and yells, “Scream honey, keep screaming,” and then, “No one will help you, no one cares.” This isn’t just Ellis being an edgy pessimist: he’s invoking a very real—and tragic—social psychological phenomenon known as the bystander effect, in which, thanks to a range of factors like diffusion of responsibility and ambiguity, bystanders to a crime are less likely to help when someone screams for assistance. However, there’s something deeper and far crueler being examined here: that it’s the world in which Bateman inhabits that doesn’t care about the horror happening within it. The abject selfishness and self-centeredness of the late 1980s in Manhattan—perhaps even Ronald Reagan’s America, a suggested but never stated theme—is the real nightmare because it allows Bateman’s behavior to exist in the first place.
This is indeed a world of cruelty and the more we’re exposed to it, the more we realize that Patrick Bateman and his heinous crimes (that may or may not actually be real) are mere examples of this world in extremis. After all, dismembering a girl with a chainsaw is true evil because it’s based in cruelty, but if cruelty is the problem, how is it any more cruel than the callous disregard for the rest of the world on display—the rest of humanity—with everyone else around Bateman and his victims? Only a world as evil as the one Bateman inhabits, is a world where he could do what he does (or imagine doing); or admit what he has done (which he does over the phone to his lawyer); or have done what he admitted thought to be a hilarious joke by that same trusted legal confidant, who doesn’t even recognize him. As Bateman says at one point during a legitimately sad, tender moment where he’s on a date with his secretary (and in the final narration of the film adaptation), “this confession has meant nothing.” A confession, especially of the sorts of monstrous crimes Bateman has supposedly committed, can only mean nothing if the world doesn’t care, and this world, without question, does not care about murdered beggars, prostitutes, and perhaps even women as a whole. These people in the world Ellis has created (or perhaps mirrored) probably wouldn’t even realize it if one of their own was butchered with an axe since everyone is a copy of a copy of a copy.
In an essay written about Charles Dickens, George Orwell wrote that, “The truth is that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work.” This, along with Orwell’s recognition that “it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions,” (a sentiment with which I agree) almost certainly also applies to Bret Easton Ellis’ work, however personal it might have been to him when writing it, and it’s most apparent in American Psycho, which is a deeply moral novel, silly as that might sound to some. That absurdity is what makes this aspect of a decidedly unsubtle novel so, well, subtle.
There’s a scene toward the end of the book, long after all the carnage has subsided, that I believe was the moral message of the entire thing. As Bateman moves through “Another broken scene in what passes for my life,” that is, being driven in a cab toward Wall Street, something remarkable happens: for the first time in the entire novel, he is rendered helpless by another human being—perhaps one of the only true human beings in the novel: the cab driver. Bateman—and by extension the reader—is helpless to his world’s forces, but at this singular point, someone—a working class cab driver—breaks the mold and recognizes Bateman for what he is: a killer (and a killer of someone he knows). He traps Bateman in his cab, speeding through Manhattan until he reaches a vacant lot, where he pulls a gun on our titular psycho and robs him blind. This is rendered all the more poetic since Bateman has just gotten done reflecting that the only thought that comforts him in his mounting fear at the cabbie’s reckless driving that “I am rich—millions are not.” After the cabbie gets what he wants—the Rolex, the gazelle-skin wallet, the Wayfarers—Bateman tries to turn on the psycho act to threaten the man, saying, “You’re a dead man, Abdullah. Count on it.” And just before the cabbie speeds off, leaving Bateman alone in the cold of the vacant lot, he shouts, “Yeah? And you’re a yuppie scumbag. Which is worse?”
Bateman then begins to weep. And then the book is over in five pages.
III. Bent Genre
Bret Easton Ellis didn’t release another novel after American Psycho for over seven years. While it’s true that a short story collection called The Informers was released in 1994, Ellis himself has stated that it was more to fill that gap between novels. The stories are, also as stated by Ellis, more fun, absurdist jaunts through 1980s Los Angeles, and none are particularly worth dwelling on (even the one involving a child being graphically murdered by a junkie). There was also a 2008 film adaptation—one which despite his direct involvement Ellis has since disowned—that requires even less analysis (though I still see it as a fine, if flawed movie with excellent performances but occasionally shaky writing). Then in 1998, Ellis’ fourth novel—and my personal favorite—Glamorama was released.
Glamorama’s overall premise is actually going to sound very familiar, especially to people from my age demographic. This isn’t because this book was wildly popular with my age cohort—far from it; if one was to recognize the name Bret Easton Ellis, it’s usually in relation to American Psycho—but rather because a classic early 2000s comedy quite brazenly “borrowed” the core concept of Glamorama. That is, the Ben Stiller modeling/celebrity world satire, Zoolander. Ellis himself has said that the similarities were close enough that legal action was taken, and supposedly, an unknown settlement was reached, but it nevertheless shows that two of Gen X’s most well-known satirists had their heads in the same place when it came to diagnosing the world they were inheriting. That is, the world of vacuous celebrity, the true meaningless nihilism it engendered, and, if one was talking about Zoolander, the silly absurdities it led to; if one was talking about Glamorama, the true reality-melting horror it wrought.
Glamorama serves as a sequel of sorts to The Rules of Attraction, in that its narrator is one of that book’s own narrators, the empty-headed globe-trotting boy-toy Victor Johnson, now under the name Victor Ward. Until Glamorama came along, it wasn’t as clear to most Ellis readers that Ellis was creating a literary expanded universe—well before Marvel Studios thought reinventing cinema into that of an endless and ultimately pointless interconnected franchise would be a good idea, but contemporaneous to Quentin Tarantino doing the same thing with his films—except for those who remembered that American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman and The Rules of Attraction’s Sean Bateman were estranged brothers, or that the dumb guy from California named Clay in Rules was the same Clay who narrated Less Than Zero. Now, with Victor taking the reins and several characters from The Rules of Attraction showing up, it was clear Ellis was telling us that his world was persistent. Outside of what is too-often derided as “genre fiction,” the idea of a “shared universe” was not all that common, but, given what Glamorama was to become as the reader progressed through its pages (and given where Ellis’ literary instincts would take him after this novel), this seems appropriate.
Glamorama begins (and remains in its own twisty-turny way) as a social satire that skewers 90s celebrity culture, featuring listing off the names of “who’s whos” of the era the same way American Psycho listed off the “what’s whats” of fashion and consumer brands. Victor Ward is a successful male model in New York City, but as he creeps closer to 30, he is feeling the need to cement his legacy: a nightclub. And that, along with his relationship drama, is the focus for the first 200 pages of Glamorama. But after a visit and request to seek out an ex-girlfriend from a mysterious character named F. Fred Palakon, and booking passage on the ocean liner the QE2 and ending up in London, everything spirals, faster and faster, and further further away, from reality. No longer is this just another New York City-set social satire. Paranoia, intrigue, terroristic ultraviolence, pornographic pansexuality, and a film crew (that may or may not be real but are in no way dissimilar to the constant documentation of the well-established world of modeling or the burgeoning one of reality TV in the mid-1990s) tailing it all: Glamorama, with the signature Ellis voice, has become a international thriller, more akin to Robert Ludlum, John Le Carre, or Ian Fleming.
I keep this all as vague as possible because, of all his novels, I consider this one to be Ellis’ masterpiece and I sincerely believe those reading this essay with any sort of curiosity should read the novel for themselves. The more Ellis-skeptical among us—and I’ve spoken to a few—see this merely as “more of the same,” but I see it as such a fundamental, careful-yet-beautifully-reckless shift into new territory that it simply cannot be ignored. It began a trend within Ellis’ writing that involved the blurring of reality found in American Psycho being made all the more overt and confusing, with the aforementioned film crew—is it a figment of the imagination, serving as a window into Victor’s mind and how he copes with the horror in which he finds himself, or is it literal? Has this world sank so low into the depths of depravity that there literally is a film crew following this male model and his terrorist comrades around Europe as they unleash hell on earth? The truth is the answer matters less than the effect placed upon the audience: either way, we, like Victor, aren’t sure what is real or unreal—everything is a dream and we have lost control of the plot we thought we always possessed.
The choices made with Glamorama, also signaled the beginning of Ellis’ newest phase: one less concerned with diagnosing society’s ills and more concerned with toying with the literary genres with which he grew up in order to serve as a vehicle for his playful blurring of reality and fiction. It helps explain why Glamorama—a novel that smacked of a spy thriller because at its core it was a spy thriller—had a follow-up in 2005 that smacked of the classic Stephen King-style horror story.
Lunar Park is, in many ways, the most “Bret Easton Ellis” novel of them all, even more than The Shards. This has less to do with its later use of genre and more to do with who Ellis cast as its protagonist: himself. Or, if we’re being more accurate, “himself.” Before blurring the lines between author and subject became par for the course with Ellis, we open the pages of Lunar Park to be greeted with what at least feels like an earnest, honest recap of “the story so far” (that is, the story of Bret Easton Ellis so far). He discusses the publication of his four novels, the reaction they garnered, and what it all meant to him as a budding fiction writer. But then the reality begins to peter out, with the first mention of a wife. While Ellis wasn’t as open about his homosexuality back in 2005 as he is now, anyone who knew anything about him, his media presence and statements therein, and his work knew that the idea of Bret Easton Ellis settling down in the suburbs with a wife and child was…we’ll say “off.” But with that suspicion, the true, unabashed fun of Lunar Park revealed itself to Ellis fans. Not only does Ellis make cheeky references to what it’s like to be perceived as a bad boy writer from the 1980s entering the doldrums of middle aged suburban life—in a far subtler and funnier way than cinematic efforts of that era, like the much-loved American Beauty—he makes use of figures from that world where he found fame, with a cameo from fellow Literary Brat Packer Jay McInerney making an appearance (the only one missing from the cast is Donna Tartt, to be honest). The book has a similar air of satirical self-consciousness, somewhat akin to that found in Glamorama, but more in the context of the world of Bret Easton Ellis, rather than that of the entire fashion world or the entire culture of the 1990s. Glamorama began this phase, while Lunar Park solidified it.
At its core, however, Lunar Park is a horror novel. Ellis himself has made it clear that Stephen King was his primary influence with this novel, and it certainly shows, with some of the scenes really dredging up real terror in the reader (as well as sharing the similarity with King’s own Dark Tower series in which King made himself a character in the story). But like an Ellis-version of a King novel, otherworldly events and forces plague the Bret Easton Ellis of the novel, including a possessed “Terby” doll and a haunting presence in the Ellis household, possibly related to his deceased father (an issue Ellis has made clear on multiple occasions as deeply affecting him in real life). There’s even a glorious return of sorts of Ellis’ most famous character—Patrick Bateman (who, at the time of Lunar Park’s publication, Ellis claimed was a character he created to manifest the disdain he felt about his father). This novel stands out among all of Ellis’ work for its genre-based departure and its blurring of the lines between author and subject—peak post-modern horror. However, in some ways, things would only get more convoluted in what was once Ellis’ “Camden-verse” (named after the fictional college at the center of all of Ellis’ protagonists in one way or another), giving way for what I like to call the “Ellis-verse.”
IV. The Ellis-verse, Part I
In retrospect, it was never a question that Bret Easton Ellis would always be a writer, but the question of whether or not fiction would continue to be his staple product became much more open midway through 2010 when he published his only true sequel and shortest novel to date, Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to his debut, Less Than Zero. This novel further blurs the lines between the real and the fictional (thus cementing the existence of the Ellis-verse), with the opening chapter, narrated by Clay, the old protagonist of Less Than Zero, talking about Less Than Zero, both the abysmal 1987 film adaptation and the novel itself. As he describes his personal issues with the novel’s characterization of “Clay,” we come to realize that this Clay, taking us through what it was like to have his life projected (inaccurately, he claims) onto the pages of a classmate’s novel, is the “Real Clay.” And perhaps more jarringly, we realize that “Bret Easton Ellis,” the unnamed writer Clay is complaining about, is indeed a character within this universe. Whether this “Bret Easton Ellis”—this “the writer” that Clay is talking about—is the same as the one who narrated Lunar Park is open for interpretation. But at this point, it’s clear that in the Ellis-verse, such distinctions or connections probably don’t matter all that much. What we now know, as readers, is that whatever we thought about Clay in Less Than Zero probably does not match with the reality of what we’re about to face with the Clay of Imperial Bedrooms.
Similar to his previous work—namely Glamorama and Lunar Park—Ellis created a genre vibe with this novel. It was less apparent than those previous two works, but he was clearly aiming for something with noir vibe, bringing to mind novels and films like The Day of the Locust, The Player, and Mulholland Dr. There is a persistent, you-probably-only-understand-if-you-live-in-LA chill that pervades throughout the story and behind it all there’s a barely suppressed anger and sense of sheer terror lurking behind every character interaction. This makes the paralleling to David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. so pointed, since that film also possessed a deep, undulating and existential terror beneath the surface, paired with the bright lights of Hollywood industry parties and sun-dappled streets of Sunset Boulevard. Paranoia permeates the novel, with Clay becoming convinced that he’s being tailed and observed, even up in his apartment that looks out over Los Angeles. And yet, similar to the characters in a Lynch film, he continues to act as if everything is normal, attending events, meetings, and castings. At one of these castings, he encounters what—or who—becomes the object of his obsession throughout the novel: Rain Turner, a gorgeous 20-something no-talent actress with whom he entices fame in order to get into her pants.
One can easily see the eerie presaging of the #metoo revelations of bad behavior in Hollywood seven years after the book’s publication, though the impression the modern reader probably should come away with is that Ellis was simply reflecting what he already knew about Hollywood and how its denizens operated (and, I’d argue, continue to operate, simply with more glossy HR guardrails in place). I won’t be so bold as to say that this characterization of transactional relationships in Imperial Bedrooms demonstrates that Ellis sees Hollywood and show business in the exact same way I do—that is, with an intensely jaundiced eye—but it certainly shows that he was always aware of how at least parts of it operated and how it attracted deeply unwell and unseemly characters, usually bubbling with narcissism.
Because that, ultimately, is what is revealed about the “Real Clay”: he is a profoundly narcissistic individual, and one who will stop at nothing to have things go his way, no matter how petty those things might be. He is the ultimate evil Hollywood player archetype, and while it becomes clearer throughout the novel that he isn’t someone one should trust, it’s not until the shocking final chapters that we realize just how depraved he—and perhaps, Ellis is suggesting, the industry at large—actually is, with his repeated sexual abuse of an underage boy and girl. In some ways, this sequence—which I more highlight as a content warning for potential readers—is more disturbing than anything Ellis has ever written (and remember, this man wrote American Psycho, as well as certain passages in Glamorama that make the skin crawl). I suspect that it’s because it feels the most real, and while there’s a certain dream-like quality to the last quarter of the novel, Clay has gone so out of his way to separate the original narrative—that is, Less Than Zero’s—from what he claims is the real narrative, that we don’t get the same sense of un-reality that we did from American Psycho’s implied fantasticality or Glamorama’s blurred events. This happened and there is no reason for it because that is simply how things are. It is indeed very hard in a post-#metoo, post-Jeffrey Epstein world to come away not feeling like this is a much broader, more explicitly moral indictment of where the world was and where it was going. This might, in part, have helped explain why Ellis seemed to leave the literary world behind after Imperial Bedrooms was released.
V. A Post-Empire Digression
Despite seeming to be finished with his literary journey in mid-2010, the place where the world was going was definitely on Bret Easton Ellis’ mind. In 2011, he penned probably his most well-known article to date for the Daily Beast, titled “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire”, in which he laid out a vision that for a long time didn’t seem all that clear to those of us who weren’t seeing what he was seeing brewing in the wider culture. In the essay, he laid out his thesis about the two worlds American culture was, in the early 2010s, bridging: that of “Empire” and that of “Post-Empire.” “Empire” was glossy profiles in Vanity Fair, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and Vogue, pre-arranged questions and answers, teams of people crafting celebrity image, minimizing the partying, the drugs, and all the rough edges, maximizing the mass appeal. “Post-Empire” was Charlie Sheen and his endless parade of prostitutes, drugs, and “tiger blood.” It was Jennifer Lawrence putting her foot in her mouth. The 2000s, Ellis argued, were the last days of Empire, which were embodied by the gaffes made by the likes of Lindsay Lohan and, back in the day, Robert Downey, Jr. The 2010s were the beginning of Post-Empire, as far as cultural norms were concerned. And for a while, it seemed like he was right. The influence of pre-planned, 6-12 minute interviews on The Tonight Show was falling away in favor on unscripted, 3-hour gab-a-thons with Joe Rogan about ferocious animals, DMT, and UFOs. Newspapers and TV shows were losing to blogs and YouTube.
And, most pointedly, there was Donald Trump. Trump, the invisible figure looming over American Psycho, dominated the news starting in 2015 thanks to this new cultural moment Ellis was calling Post-Empire. Trump was everything Empire, in the political realm at least, was not: unscripted, uncouth, vile, vituperative. This was, Ellis saw without saying it, exactly where the culture was going. As Andrew Breitbart observed, as Ellis agreed, and as Trump’s election in 2016 proved, politics had moved downstream from culture more than ever before.
This is why Ellis, in his absence from the literary world (and occasional appearance in the cinematic one, including the crowd-funded tragic dud, The Canyons, directed by the legendary Paul Schraeder), entered the world of cultural criticism and politics, thanks to the toxic marriage of politics and culture that was consumated by the forces behind the 2016 election. Ellis himself has stated that he was never particular political—a vaguely liberal Democrat who divided his time between New York and Los Angeles (being a gay man helped during the Bush Jr. years)—but that toxic marriage, which was quickly infecting his true love (that is cinema, but also literature), was ruining culture, a part of society of which he had always been a part. This helped come to define his artistic output in the 2010s, which, starting in 2013, resulted in the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. This show, of which I was, of course, a devoted listener, was a combination of cultural criticism, usually delivered in Ellis-penned monologues by the man himself, and interview, where he had long and free wheeling conversations, usually about cinema, music, and show business, with a wide variety of figures, ranging from Kanye West in the very first episode, to Eli Roth to Anthony Jeselnik, to Shirley Manson to Karyn Kusama, and to Quentin Tarantino to the aforementioned Paul Schraeder. Sometimes the episodes even got contentious, with Ellis’ acerbic takes rubbing some of his guests the wrong way, including a particularly noteworthy episode with Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, fresh off their success with the funny-but-still-overrated Portlandia. The show was always entertaining, and even insightful at times, and it let us see a more talkative and opinionated side of Ellis (as well as many of his guests). It wasn’t particularly surprising when a lot of the themes of (and even elements lifted directly from) the show made their way into print near the close of the decade, in Ellis’ first (and to date, only) work of printed non-fiction, 2019’s White.
With this collection of essays, Ellis displayed his usual keen observant eye, but without the filter of fiction. This was all Ellis’ own voice, and one that many of us—at least those who had been spending the last several years listening to his podcast—had gotten used to hearing. And yet, it was still strange to see something so unfiltered about it. There was, as best one could tell, no post-modernist-derived irony, no vagueness, no numbness, no real literary vibe. And yet, it was still distinctly part of the Bret Easton Ellis catalogue. If one wanted to be slavish to the Ellis-verse lore (which I’m not), they could even argue that this was the real Bret Easton Ellis hinted at in Imperial Bedrooms showing his face. In reality, I suspect White was Ellis’ way of collecting his thoughts on our Post-Empire condition, which had long-since become fully normalized. The essays, upon whom one can easily feel the brilliant Joan Didion influence, can all be read independent of one another, but are clearly connected, both in theme, and as a string of consciousness. There is still a narrative in there. The reflection on Donald Trump serving as an ignition for cultural derangement is particularly powerful—and extremely frustrating for the intelligentsia, as can be seen in many interviews and profiles from the time—as are the musings on the coddling of the millennial generation—“Generation Wuss”, as Ellis calls us. Things even get challenging, with Ellis cogitating on the meaning of being a white male (perhaps especially a gay one) in a culture that at least seems to express hostility toward such an identity, as well as the kind of privileges one can still experience despite that hostility. It’s hardly a reactionary screed, as much as he and his work’s haters might have one believe.
But as enjoyable, and welcome, as the collection was in 2019, the world was about to get jolted in a way that it hadn’t been for almost two decades. And thanks to that jolt, the Post-Empire Ellis had so concerned himself with diagnosing, analyzing, and discussing for the past eight years started to become, if anything, less important than what had always mattered: the story.
VI. The Ellis-verse, Part II
For anyone who wasn’t subscribed to the since-2017-Patreon-exclusive Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, it likely came as a shock in the waning months of 2022 to hear that there was a new Bret Easton Ellis novel releasing in early 2023 called The Shards. I hadn’t been a paid subscriber, thanks largely to lacking the disposable income to support all of my favorite podcasters (which actually is one of my life goals, so please help me reach it by subscribing here or on Patreon…well, you know the rest), so this was largely news to me as well, but I learned—as did the rest of us poor plebs—that Ellis had actually already been releasing this new novel directly to his podcast listeners/supporters—in serialized audio form. This was something I had never considered as a way to release a novel, or really any type of literature, and something that has stuck in my mind ever since (as to the question of whether or not I’ll do the same for any of my own fiction, well, never say never). Apparently, ever since COVID-19 hit, Ellis had been hard at work penning what would eventually become his longest novel to date, and he’d been reading from it to his listeners. And in January of 2023, The Shards released for the rest of the world to read. It saw a lot of success and, in a rare move, almost universal praise for Ellis’ ability to tell an engaging story and actually embrace the sentimentality he’d been arguably avoiding for his nearly-four-decade career. There were of course criticisms—there always are—but seemingly for once, there was no hate (and certainly no death threats).
And this, ultimately, makes sense. The Shards serves as both a return to form and as something new. What’s new is just how traditional it feels, from a literary standpoint. It’s very straightforward; there is no ambiguity in the plot, or what anything “means”, or warring interpretations on what might be “at stake”, as cultural critics like to say. It’s a straightforward mystery set in 1980s Los Angeles—namely the San Fernando Valley—narrated by the 17-year-old, well, Bret Easton Ellis. And this is where the return to form occurs. While it’s never made as abundantly clear as it is in his other novels, The Shards serves, at least in my opinion, as yet another entry in the wider “Ellis-verse.” The line between literature and memoir is so blurry—at least until the final chapters—that it might throw the reader for a loop. There are no signifiers, like “Camden College” or “Clay” or “Bateman”, and indeed, the school Ellis attends in the novel, Buckley, is a real place where Ellis did attend for high school. But when one stops to consider the timeline—that is, where this particular Bret Easton Ellis exists in the Ellis-verse timeline—there’s no reason for any of these things to come up. He’s still someone with aspirations to become a writer—just as “the writer” Clay spoke of in Imperial Bedrooms was. The lines may be blurrier than they’ve ever been, and that, as we’ve seen, reflects its status as being just as much a part of the Ellis-verse as anything else. Ellis himself has spoken about the blurred lines to be seen more contemporary literature, like that of Tao Lin, Sean Thor Conroe, and other quasi-memoirists/writers of autofiction—this is, in some ways, yet another genre piece.
What also blurs the lines is this is the only novel of Ellis’ to date where his protagonist is unambiguously attracted to the same sex. The Ellis of the novel (who I’ll call “Bret” from here on out) experiences varying levels of passion with his girlfriend throughout the book, but the carnal desires are primarily relegated to other boys at his school. One can tell that Ellis, the writer in this case, is drawing from deeply personal (and perhaps painful) feelings from his youth regarding the yearning he felt for other boys, including those who didn’t share those feelings. The cool, detached, gay-man-in-a-glass-closet the public came to know and love (and love to hate) does not exist in this novel because, as Ellis would have it, he could not. He was deeply closeted, and not necessarily because of a violently homophobic society that surrounded him. That, in the world of The Shards, is just political rhetoric of the 21st century; in reality, the closet in which 17-year-old Ellis lives, is made of a vague shame, knowing that he can’t be open about how he feels, what he does, and who he is. That shame is borne from a sheer—and obvious—terror of isolation, of losing the love of the popular kids with whom he’s become close. That terror is made manifest by the vast empty house in which he lives while his parents are off galivanting around Europe. It’s dark and full of shadows, and when it isn’t eerily silent, it’s filled with strange sounds. This doesn’t imply a home intruder or anything so obvious (though that does come into play); it implies a fear of emptiness, i.e. a fear of isolation. That this is so tied up in Bret’s desperation to keep his “secret,” as he calls it, is unlikely to be an accident.
And serving as background to the entire story, there is a serial killer prowling the San Fernando Valley known as The Trawler. As hinted earlier, there’s a sense that the killer may be coming after Bret and his friends, and the disappearance of one of Bret’s male lovers, raises the stakes all the more. Perhaps tied to this killer, perhaps not (though Bret certainly thinks so), is the new kid at Buckley, Robert Mallory. Without spoiling anything, it fast becomes clear that Bret’s distrust and eventual hatred of Mallory is indeed borne out of a very real fear, but it becomes less and less clear of whether that’s a fear of what Mallory will actually do, or more what Mallory represents. The question of closeted sexuality, the murderous possibilities, and the unhinged and open freedom of 1980s youth culture in California, all hang over this novel and its events. It’s quite possibly Ellis’ most sophisticated novel to date. Some have complained of its length, but there feels like there is very little fat on this one. Not since Glamorama has a Bret Easton Ellis novel seemed this confident.
The question of whether or not this is a return to the Ellis-verse may be confirmed when (or if) Ellis writes another novel. Personally, I hope to see another sequel, specifically to American Psycho, with an aging Patrick Bateman attempting to navigate his madness in the absurdities of a world dominated by stakeholder capitalism, ESGs, and his ever-present desire to fit in playing out in all the brilliant satirical ways that one can possibly imagine. Or, perhaps, Ellis will write something more in the vein of The Shards, signaling a new literary era for the fans to dissect as I’ve attempted to do here. Maybe the Ellis-verse will be proven to be dead, having died back when the “Real Clay” killed it in 2010. Or maybe he’s done with literature, for real this time. Any of these possibilities are valid because they all mean the same thing: they would be authentically those of Bret Easton Ellis. As Random House editor Gerry Howard once wrote in Salon:
“I find Bret Ellis’ scalding, cynical, brittle, savagely unillusioned worldview curiously refreshing. He is the Loki or Trickster of the literary world (or maybe the Lou Reed), poking sharp sticks in our eyes and daring us to figure out if he could possibly mean that. Deal with it. In a culture that has the phrase ‘Good job!’ on endless rotation, he dares to say, over and over, ‘You must be fucking kidding me.’ He’s incorrigible, he’s not a nice boy, he doesn’t care if you become a better person, he is not in any way seeking your approval. Good for him. Some brave college should ask him to do a commencement address.”
VII. Epilogue
I have made it clear what I think of Bret Easton Ellis’ career, of his books, of their themes, and of his concerns, at least as I see them. But I struggled for a while to explain why I care so much. I’ve found that the question—why do even you care?—underlies so much criticism of long-winded prose (of which I’m certainly guilty) on the internet today. And for many months as I worked on this essay here and there, I would continue coming back to that question. I did promise in an earlier update post that I was working on this and I do like to keep my promises to the people who are kind enough to hear me out for hours at a time, both here and on History Impossible, but that doesn’t explain why I think doing a deep dive into my first favorite author’s work is necessary. It’s also not just because the man has cultivated a massive stable of haters that tend to claim his voice and perspective are overrated or even don’t matter at all—he does not need my defense. Or anyone else’s for that matter; he’s a big boy. He can also live with the knowledge that he diagnosed the culture before and better than anyone else did more than once. And while right there I made it clear why I think Ellis is culturally significant, I don’t think I really need to make that point any finer than I already have. The truth is, I wanted to write this because I wanted to give credit where it was due; the credit of influence, literary, cultural, political, and attitudinal. That last one is the most important.
In some ways, of all of Ellis’ work, I have the fondest memories of reading Imperial Bedrooms, even if it isn’t my favorite book Ellis wrote (though it’s certainly climbed the ranks as I’ve worked on this essay). It was mid-2010 and I was entering a new era of my life, one of distinct possibilities but no certainties. I was almost 24; I had a new girlfriend (one with whom I would remain for another, as of this writing, 13 years); I was leaving behind feelings for an old relationship and the varying levels of wreckage created by several flings; I was discovering which collegiate friendships were sustainable; I was feeling the need to escape my hometown, which would happen only one year later; I was ready to redefine myself, as many men in their early 20s are; I was looking at the world as only someone first truly entering it can. And this was made all the more significant by how the world was changing around all of us then; as Ellis would have it, I literally was living on the cusp of Empire and Post-Empire, though I of course didn’t see it.
Mainly, though, I had come to believe that I would also be a writer, namely of fiction, and I was typing away at a first novel (well, technically second, but no writer wants to acknowledge their real first novel started in adolescence). Ellis was still one of my biggest influences, but my tastes had been expanding into other excellent writers with Gen X sensibilities whose work have also shaped me, like Michael Chabon and Jennifer Egan. Nevertheless, Ellis remained one of my tether points to which I could return if I needed some inspiration. So, sitting in the bedroom of my old college apartment one night as a small party was blaring in the other room, I was flying through Imperial Bedrooms. I was rediscovering the spare and dark prose that animated me throughout college and the latter half of high school, and taking mental notes on possible future themes and stories I wanted to tell, with which I could use this book—like Ellis’ others—as initial inspiration.
…And then I reached the end of the novel, and I saw that final line: that epitaph of sorts, which stated plainly “The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away—I now want to explain all these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people,”…followed by a simple “1985-2010.” It was clear that Ellis was ending something. One could simply see this as a reference to Clay’s saga; or perhaps even the Ellis-verse. However, I recognized the date of 1985 as the date of Less Than Zero’s publication. Despite the constantly blurred lines of fiction and the real world in the Ellis-verse, this was a rare thing from Ellis: a sincere claim. An era was ending. Namely, perhaps, an era of writing literature. Or maybe it was simply an era of my own tastes, my own life.
I still remember realizing this with a jolt, and feeling oddly (since I didn’t know the man, just his art) untethered. An influence—one of my biggest influences—was leaving the game I was just entering. And while that did fill me with a touch of anxiety and even a bit of dread—my favorite writer was giving up writing?!—I think it was probably one of the most important things that could have happened to me at that time in my life: it forced me to try and find my own voice. This isn’t to say that I didn’t continue to take influence from Ellis or other writers whose work I loved (and still love); but for whatever reason, the message that literary epitaph sent me was unmistakable: you’re on your own. This might seem cold, but as I see it (and I’m pretty sure as Ellis sees it), it’s one of the most important things you can teach a young person, especially someone who fashions themselves as an artist. You are on your own. This isn’t just another way of saying “we’re born alone, we die alone, etc etc”; it’s to say, you need to figure this out for yourself. There are no more guard rails, there are no more rules; I’m not here to hold your hand. And while it’s obvious Ellis wasn’t making that point with his epitaph, that’s how it resonated with me.
It still took me—as it does with most people—many more years to fully form an identity that I’d like to think was my own, but it was indeed mine, instead of it being a pose learned from a post-modern Gen X author whose work clicked with me. I likely would have been able to do it on my own, but getting that push, however subtle, from a little throw-away epitaph at the end of Imperial Bedrooms, possesses the value of Bret Easton Ellis’ entire catalogue of work. The absurd irony that a catalogue so filled with depravity, violence, and cynicism can be a source of such inspiration to become your own man—and whose author can continue to inspire long after you’ve become one—is not lost on me, but it’s something that those who appreciate the absurdities of the Ellis-verse (not to mention the man who created it) can hopefully appreciate.