Bret Easton Ellis

In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis shocked, stunned and disturbed with Less Than Zero, his 'extraordinarily accomplished first novel' (New Yorker), successfully chronicling the frightening consequences of unmitigated hedonism within the ranks of the ethically bereft youth of 80s Los Angeles. Twenty-five years later, Ellis returns to those same characters - to Clay and the band of infamous teenagers whose lives weave sporadically through his - but now, they face an even greater period of disaffection: their own middle age.

Clay seems to have moved on - he's become a successful screenwriter - but when he returns from New York to Los Angeles, to help cast his new movie, he's soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his vulnerable former girlfriend, is now married to Trent - still a bisexual philanderer - and their Beverly Hills parties attract excessive levels of fame and fortune. Clay's childhood friend Julian is a recovering addict running an ultra-discreet, high-class escort service, and their old dealer Rip, reconstructed and face-lifted nearly beyond recognition, is involved in activities far more sinister than those of his notorious past.

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 seemingly endless proclivity for betrayal leads him to be drawn further and further into this ominous case it looks like he will face far more serious consequences than ever before.

Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California) is an American author. He is considered to be one of the major Generation X authors and was regarded as one of the Brat Pack. His novels feature a "flat affect" and a glossy, empty style that garners him extremely polarized reviews. Ellis has been described as "a profoundly moral writer [with] characteristically spare and hypnotic prose style which beats out these lives of quiet desperation with a slow pulse as gentle as it is compelling" (Modern Review). He has called himself a moralist, while he has been pegged as a nihilist. His characters are young, generally vacuous people, who are aware of their depravity but choose to enjoy it. Ellis prefers to set his novels in the 1980s, utilizing the overt commercialism of the entertainment industry of the decade as a symbol. The novels are also linked by common, recurring characters, and dystopic locales (such as Los Angeles and New York).

- Less Than Zero (1985)
A raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation.

- The Rules Of Attraction (1987)
A startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the future--or even the present--who become entangled in a curious romantic triangle.

- American Psycho (1998)
Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

- The Informers (1994)
A chilling, fascinating, and outrageous descent into the abyss beneath L.A.'s gorgeous surfaces.

- Glamorama (1998)
In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed culture and increases the volume exponentially.

- Lunar Park (2005)
Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution.

He was born in Los Angeles and raised in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, the son of Robert Martin Ellis, a wealthy property developer, and Dale Ellis, a housewife. His parents divorced in 1982. He was educated at The Buckley School, where he did not distinguish himself, and then took a music-based course at Bennington College in Vermont, which is thinly disguised as Camden Arts College in his novel The Rules of Attraction and his other books. He was a part-time musician in some minor 1980s bands, such as The Parents, before his first book was published while he was still a student. Less Than Zero, a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles, was well received by the critics and sold respectably (50,000 copies in its first year). He moved to New York in 1987 to release his second novel.

His most controversial work, the graphically violent novel American Psycho, was intended to be published by Simon & Schuster but they withdrew after external protests (NOW, and many others, considered the novel dangerously misogynistic and worse) and pressure from Gulf & Western. The novel was later published by Vintage. Some consider this novel, whose protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is both a cartoonishly materialistic yuppie and a serial killer, to be an example of transgressive art. American Psycho has achieved considerable cult status.