A review by litdoes
The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis
3.0
A wasteland of the young and disillusioned fill the cast of this nihilistic novel. The landscape is set in LA, the City of Angels, Hollywood, and the time sits squarely in the mid-eighties at the height of MTV, where tanned and synthetic looking blond boys and girls hang. Names of rock stars and actors, movie, music and other pop culture references are generously thrown in for good measure.
Valium is the choice antidote to partied-out hipsters and coke the designer drug used by the early twenty-somethings as well as their parents and stepparents. Rich, privileged and promiscuously bisexual, a main character that is related in some way to the others elsewhere in the book is featured in each chapter . They are callous, even in the face of death and destruction and the party never stops - not for a minute. There is something chillingly familiar yet fantastical about the stories, as one character says near the end of the story, "it's like a movie I've seen before and I know what's going to happen... How the whole thing's going to end."
The stories get decidedly more hopeless and bleak as you read on, like a journey down the abyss of all that's base in human nature. Families are dysfunctional; parents and children have little in common except getting wasted on alcohol or using the same party drugs and getting high, and sleeping with the same partners. For the most part, the stories are realistic and chilling, except when vampires and kidnappers/murderers join this cast. While still in keeping with the decadence of the other stories, I felt that the narrative in these segments spiralled into a kind of gore and violence that seem a little misaligned with the rest of the novel. I felt the same way with the author's other novel, "Lunar Park", when supernatural elements appeared in the story and took over the rest of the narrative.
That said, the tone of the novel is consistently detached and matter of fact, which is something that the writer excels in, making the appalling events and the characters' responses to them all the more chilling.
Valium is the choice antidote to partied-out hipsters and coke the designer drug used by the early twenty-somethings as well as their parents and stepparents. Rich, privileged and promiscuously bisexual, a main character that is related in some way to the others elsewhere in the book is featured in each chapter . They are callous, even in the face of death and destruction and the party never stops - not for a minute. There is something chillingly familiar yet fantastical about the stories, as one character says near the end of the story, "it's like a movie I've seen before and I know what's going to happen... How the whole thing's going to end."
The stories get decidedly more hopeless and bleak as you read on, like a journey down the abyss of all that's base in human nature. Families are dysfunctional; parents and children have little in common except getting wasted on alcohol or using the same party drugs and getting high, and sleeping with the same partners. For the most part, the stories are realistic and chilling, except when vampires and kidnappers/murderers join this cast. While still in keeping with the decadence of the other stories, I felt that the narrative in these segments spiralled into a kind of gore and violence that seem a little misaligned with the rest of the novel. I felt the same way with the author's other novel, "Lunar Park", when supernatural elements appeared in the story and took over the rest of the narrative.
That said, the tone of the novel is consistently detached and matter of fact, which is something that the writer excels in, making the appalling events and the characters' responses to them all the more chilling.