Same old perversions

Memory Lane always looked so unthreatening to me. But this is Bret Easton Ellis, so a cast reunion for the characters he first wrote about in Less Than Zero 25 years ago is bound to end in tears, screaming and blood. And so it does, with grim efficiency. No sooner has our protagonist, Clay, checked back into his Hollywood apartment complex, than he is plunged feet-first into a swamp of paranoia, sin and violent double-cross. As the doorman says to him on his return, ‘Welcome back.’

So what’s Clay been up to all these years? Becoming a screenwriter would be the literalist’s answer, but drifting further into Easton Ellis’s subconscious is more the truth of it. Imperial Bedrooms begins with Clay’s description of a movie, ‘based on a book written by someone we knew’. That book: Less Than Zero. That movie: the real-life 1987 adaptation of Less Than Zero. Immediately we know we’re in the same fact-as-fiction twilight zone that Easton Ellis explored so compellingly in his previous novel, Lunar Park.