Imperial Bedrooms - Hardcover

"Taut and ultimately terrifying....In six novels, the author has emerged as one of the most gifted and serious novelists working in America today." --Hari Kunzru, "Financial Times" "Brutally conceived, and effectively done....There is no doubt that Ellis retains the ability to startle and disquiet." --Stephen Abell, "The Times Literary Supplement" "Ellis remains a bold ignorer of literary boundaries. "Imperial Bedrooms" is but another unexpected swerve in a wonderfully weird career." J. Robert Lennon, "London Review of Books" "Enough talk of [Ellis's] literary genius, let's call him what he really is: a terrific horror writer. "Imperial Bedrooms" is an absolute creepfest [and] a festival of panting paranoia." --Thomas Conner, "Chicago Sun-Times" "A profoundly talented--and occasionally even brilliant--writer...Ellis has a fictional territory all his own and, heaven forbid, a mastery there." --Jeff Simon, "Buffalo News" "A page-turning read [with] a sneaky subtlety...Holding a mirror to our desires, Ellis shows us how much scarier what we think we want can be when severed from even the possibility of innocence, [employing] noirish staples to lure his reader along while subtly circling back to the older--and more frightening--theme: the dead soul." --Michael McGregor, "The Oregonian" "This is the most Chandleresque of Bret's books, and the most deeply steeped in L.A. noir...As Dante's hell is circular, so is [Ellis's] L.A. Everywhere in "Imperial Bedrooms" there is a sense of time frozen, time collapsed and time rounding back on itself in various diabolical ways...What stays with [the reader] is not so much the concluding note of betrayal and horror as the mournfulness of the book, its eerie sense of stasis: clear skies, vacuum-sealed calm, the BlackBerry flashing on the nightstand in the middle of the night, everywhere the subliminal hum of menace." --Donna Tartt, Amazon.com "A page-turner..."Imperial Bedroom

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.