In Bed With Bret Easton Ellis

In his latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, iconoclastic novelist Bret Easton Ellis (author of The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho) revisits the beautiful, drugged-out, morally vacuous creatures of his bestselling debut, Less Than Zero. Now Julian, Rip, Clay, Blair and Trent are 25 years older, but, it seems, no wiser. Still locked in a Dante-esque limbo, they flit back and forth behind their sunglasses and tinted SUVs, not-eating in hip restaurants and lounging at poolside parties, having relocated from New York to Easton Ellis' current hometown of Los Angeles. Xanax has a place at the table and they all have careers, in one form or another, within a Hollywood that seems ridden with vice and recklessness. Julian, the former junkie rent-boy is now a pimp. Clay’s ex-girlfriend Blair and retired male model Trent share a loveless marriage. Drug-dealer-turned-property-mogul Rip has had so much plastic surgery he’s unrecognizable. And Clay has become a screenwriter of dubious skill, using what limited power his position brings to seduce wide-eyed actresses fresh off the bus from Kansas. At a recent lecture on London’s Southbank—where the author admitted to an embarrassing obsession with TV series The Hills—Easton Ellis commented that his debut, written when he was just 19, would have been a very different prospect if the characters all had mobile phones. In the new novel he gets to incorporate our era’s new technology, with internet viral videos of supposed executions and death-threats-by-text-message.  Today, he reads an extract from the opening of Imperial Bedrooms, exclusively for NOWNESS. For a chance to bag yourself a signed copy of the book, enter our Bret Easton Ellis Sweepstakes before August 1.


Bret Easton Ellis photographed in his office by Douglas Friedman, 2010