IMPERIAL BEDROOMS

I can now declare the zombie-novel craze of the past few years officially dead. The best zombie novel of summer 2010 has finally arrived: Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis. Characters Clay, Julian, Blair, Rip, and Trent of Less Than Zero have been dug up from the grave and set free to shuffle about the trendy hot spots of Los Angeles and environs once again.

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Imperial Bedrooms doesn't have quite the same punch that predecessor Less than Zero did. The problem is that the characters of Less than Zero came alive. They didn't come to life in the 1987 movie of the same name. They have come back to life in Imperial Bedrooms. However, they came most to life in MTV-produced shows Laguna Beach and spinoff The Hills, which gave us the Spencer, Heidi, Brody, and Lauren television versions of literary characters Clay, Blair, Julian, and Rip.

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The problem with the elaborately scripted and producer-influenced television shows, full of their heightened drama and meticulously planned cinematography and overacting, is that the vacuous characters are just that, and only that. The characters of Imperial Bedrooms may be vapid and vacuous, but there is something familiar about them, something I can relate to, that is absent in The Hills.

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Imperial Bedrooms contains elements from previous Bret Easton Ellis novels Less than Zero, American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park. Familiar characters encounter a world filled with ghosts, brand names, surveillance, advertising, drugs and alcohol, unfulfilling sex, dinners, and party upon party. The hollowness of the past (Less than Zero) roars through the present (Imperial Bedrooms) such that the winds blow away the thin fabric of the characters and the few bits of flesh of their likewise empty lives.

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Some have accused Clay, the narrator of Imperial Bedrooms, to be a moral monster. He may lack compassion for others. He may lack empathy for even his purported friends. He may finally rid himself of the untrustworthy Julian in an act of narcissistic self-preservation. His acts pale, however, when covered by the shadow of the plastic surgery disaster once known as Rip. Rip is Leatherface of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the 1974 Tobe Hooper original, not the 2003 remake) resurrected on the pages of BEE's newest novel. He also seems slightly possessed with the spirits of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho and Bobby Hughes from Glamorama.

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I am probably too biased to give Imperial Bedrooms the fair assessment that it deserves. I love Bret Easton Ellis, considering him one of the great American moralists. This isn't a great novel, especially with its reliance on recycled characters and themes, but I still highly recommend it. Stare into the banality, the horror, and recognize yourself.