Less Than Zero

This book is gorgeous. It’s about a group of spoiled-rotten high school friends who have started to drift apart after attending college. There’s an interesting backstory to this novel, too: Ellis wrote the first draft in eight weeks while high on crystal meth (don’t believe me? Read the Rolling Stone interview).

The minimalist prose and haunting theme of how overindulgence leads to chronic emptiness make a nihilistic meditation on excess.

“Sentimental” is maybe the last word you’d use to describe Ellis’ fiction, but Less Than Zero is an elegant proof that form needn’t follow function.

For all the sparseness of its language and pitilessness of its characters, there is a profound empathy for its narrator Clay, a pensive college freshman who’s returned home to California for Christmas break. Clay expends no outward moral judgment on the depravity of those who populate his very Gothic Los Angeles, but we come to intuitively understand his reticence as less a disposition than a defense.

It is precisely in how he understates his pain… show more.

While I’ve never loved Bret Easton Ellis, even as a writer, I’ve always felt this was by design.

Less Than Zero paints a bleak world where young people with nothing to lose get a crash course on exactly how silly of an idea that is. There’s always something to lose, even in recklessness.

No one imagines their life turning out irrevocably caustic, yet it is a commonality from the protagonists' viewpoint. They don’t know how bad it can be, and neither do we until we see it for ourselves.

The idea of recontextualizing our viewpoint on a character’s worldview has… show more.

Most people know Brett Easton Ellis as the author behind American Psycho, the brilliant and often misunderstood satire about the nihilism of Wall Street culture. With all the controversy and misconceptions around that book, all too many readers neglect to read his first masterpiece, Less than Zero.

Ellis wrote this book when he was twenty years old, which is an incredible feat. As someone who has seen the corrupt, nihilistic, and cynical world of the rich and dysfunctional from the inside, I find this book to be not only spot on but exceedingly frightening. The world that he… show more.

Living in London under Margaret Thatcher and seemingly permanent grey skies, Ellis’s tale of rich kids in Los Angeles doing little else but fucking, drinking, taking drugs, and hanging out at expensive restaurants and cool parties made me want to sell everything I owned (very little back then) and jump on a plane. I often regret that I didn’t. Ellis’s book captures perfectly the strange mix of manic determination and tranquilised-around-the-edges ennui that I later found so characteristic of Los Angeles.

I could argue that this is the bleakest horror book on the list, though the horror doesn’t come from your typical tropes. Drug addiction, sex, emptiness, and despair are all present themes here and the way Ellis writes his characters – the way they interact, react, and what they value – is haunting in a way that’s very unique and at times, downright chilling. The end of this book will never leave you.

Ok, as I ended the review of the last book with a cliche, I needed to redeem myself by throwing a curveball. While Less Than Zero is not considered a zombie book, one could argue the emotionally and morally dead characters traversing in an environment that is so bleak and without hope, it could be described as apocalyptic, puts this book into the zombie apocalypse genre. I loved how the author includes short stories, sometimes completely unrelated to the characters or plot, in chapters that were so concise that some were only a page long. An outstanding book, which was… show more.