The Writer - Bret Easton Ellis

“They had made a movie about us”- Imperial Bedrooms

American literature is a curious thing.

There are the stalwarts that have become a brand, the mechanized typing machines that could (and do) turn a boatload of drivel into a New York Times bestseller. There are the grocery store checkout lane pushers, scribers of campy romance novellas with bare chested Fabio’s painted on the cover. There are those few unapologetic, unabashed gutter heroes, like the inimitable Charles Bukowski.

There are the teen vampire exploiters. The Hemingway’s. The cliché dealers who are published and the unknown game changers that lie haplessly at the bottom of slush piles.

It is unclear where Bret Easton Ellis fits in. But somewhere in between the Don DeLillo’s and Chuck Palahniuk’s, he has left quite the impact. And the pages keep on turning.

Easton Ellis was a mere 21 years of age when his seminal Less Than Zero shook the publishing world. Dubbed then as a “Brat Pack” author, the voice of his generation, the shockingly frank and nihilistic reality of disaffected youth with too much money and not enough something has been considered to be the exposé of the 1980’s greed culture. It was an era the California born Easton Ellis contributed to, amongst the wealth and moral decay of Los Angeles. Hollywood wasted little time optioning the book for cinema, though they liberally concealed the true seedy underbelly of their own back yard, a criminal offense to purists. The book turned Easton Ellis into a lightning rod of controversy and subjected him to attacks from numerous groups for his supposed misogynistic themes. The attention, from either side, validated him. The void of socially relevant novels at the time was filled with the ramblings of dangerous melancholy.

A cult was born.

The marriage of Tinseltown and the written word continued withAmerican Psycho and it's disturbingly lovable serial killer/Whitney Houston junkie, Patrick Bateman. Satirical and dark and obscene to the readers of commercial books that were traditionally entrenched in safety and shiny endings, this work cemented Easton Ellis as the premier mind behind a hellacious (and addictive) literary vision; violence, absurdity, and a dim worldview.

Glamorama. Lunar Park. The Informers. Imperial Bedrooms.

The lived-through-the chaos, memoir styling of Easton Ellis has created a niche for the author. Drugs, death, pornography. Despair, torment, an eclipse blocking the happy sunset. In a strange shot of irony, he may as well be considered a screenwriter; his work tends to find its way on film anyway. Cosmically, his too-dark-for Hollywood tales are an object of desire for industry types, while maintaining an edge and an underground credibility with his loyal flock. This malleability, this shifty accoutrement to his essence, the ability to slide back and forth between mediums and devotees is a portrait of his work. He is, to many, equal parts brilliant, disgusting, and an outcast (with keys to the clubhouse).

A social media maestro, Bret Easton Ellis has created a stir recently through that eternally necessary device known as Twitter. Inklings of a continuation of American Psycho have turned into literary fervor. Ideas and what-ifs between Easton Ellis and his hungry readers have been exchanged through this medium with gusto, leaving the author as an accessible brand without denting his myth. The salacious possibilities of a middle aged Patrick Bateman quenching his murderous thirst has heads buzzing.

We can just envision the yuppie-tastic sadism now. They’ll likely make a film about it.

And as we are prone to do in any Easton Ellis project, we will immerse ourselves into the recesses of our darkest guilty pleasures.

Disappear here.