A review by trevorjameszaple
The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis

2.0

For most of the book Ellis is writing about what Ellis is ALWAYS writing about: the sad lives of the tragically hip, the soullessness of his generation (and don't even get him started on the next one!) and the utterly vapid moral sinkhole that is Los Angeles. Because this is more of a short story collection than a proper novel, the characters are all loosely connected to each other. The first half of the book features short, vague vignettes of Ellis characters, the kind you just want to stick a knife into so they'll finally shut up. The nadir of this is an epistolary story about a young Camden girl (Jesus H Christ, here we go) full of feelings and awkward earnestness who writes a series of letters to Sean Bateman (dear god...). She moves to Los Angeles and slowly loses her earnestness and emotion; L.A. turns her into another vapid libertine who can't feel anything and relies on drugs for moments of feeling human. Ellis isn't even trying by this point; it's literally as though someone read Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction and decided to write Bret Easton Ellis fan-fiction. Just absolutely awful.

Then we get a supremely fucked-up Eighties rock star, a heroin-soaked child killer in the desert near Las Vegas, a dying girl just trying to work on her tan, and some vampires. Honestly, Bret Easton Ellis writing a vampire story was sort of what saved this book for me (that and Bryan Metro Goes To Japan) as it managed to differentiate itself momentarily from being a bad Ellis pastiche. At the very least it reminded me that he did, after all, write American Psycho.

Still, this one's for fans only.