Bret Easton Ellis - Less Than Zero -1985 - 200p
Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964) is an American author. He is considered to be one of the Generation X 1980s authors. His novels feature "flat affect" and a glossy, empty style which garner him extremely mixed 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 penned as a nihilist. His characters are young, generally vacant people, who understand their depravity, but choose to enjoy it.
Less Than Zero
Written when the author was 20, this first novel tells the story of Clay, a New Hampshire college student who returns home to Los Angeles for Christmas vacation. Vignettes show Clay and his friends aimlessly traveling from party to party, doing drugs, having sex with one another. PW noted that Ellis "brilliantly conveys this crowd's delirium as well as the lack of fulfillment they cannot remedy."