Imperial Bedrooms is the newest novel by Bret Easton Ellis, a sequel to his debut novel Less Than Zero.

Plot:
Clay, by now a fourty-something screen writer, returns to Los Angeles for the casting of his newest film after having lived in New York for a bit, mostly to get over a recent break-up. Clay reconnects with his old circle of friends and soon starts dating the young actress Rain, who would like to be cast in his film. But someone is following Clay around LA and writing mysterious SMS. And somehow all is connected to the brutal murder of another actor.

Imperial Bedrooms didn’t impress me much. It is well-written but it does kind of make you wonder whether Bret Easton Ellis is a bit of a one-trick pony and has already reached his height with American Psycho. [Not that I’ve read everything by him, but still.]

[SPOILERS]

Imperial Bedrooms starts off great, with a self-referential chapter about the movie adaptation of Less than Zero that I enjoyed a whole lot. Unfortunately this was also the best part of the book.

It was completely obvious that Clay is not a good guy. The way he only gets his rock off when he coerces the women he sleeps with, his seemingly coming out of nowhere bruises etc. I’m not sure whether it was meant to be a surprise that he is a complete psycho but for that to work, Easton Ellis forshadowed it much too well and made it the only logical conlusion. But then again, maybe that was his intent – to show that the society Clay lives in can only produce monsters. But then why is (almost) everybody else more or less normal? [Normal, in this case, only defined as “not being a sociopath”.]

The book is short and very well written. Easton Ellis uses run-on sentences a lot, which give the book an interesting pacing and that I quite liked. So it is enjoyable. But I just didn’t connect with it emotionally at all. I remained about as alienated from the book as Clay from the world around him.

Summarising: Left me cold.