Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope.

Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.

-It only looks like the good life-

Less Than Zero was loosely adapted into a movie in 1987 starring Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, Robert Downey, Jr., and James Spader. The film focuses on an anti-drug message, rather than the emptiness of the characters' lives as in the novel.

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).

- 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.