Imperial Bedrooms retains Ellis' characteristic transgressive style and applies it to the 2000s (decade) and 2010s, covering amongst other things, the impact of new communication technologies on daily lives.
As with his previous works, Imperial Bedrooms depicts scenes of sex, extreme violence and hedonism in a minimalist style devoid of emotion.
Some reviewers felt the novel was a successful return to themes explored in Less than Zero, Lunar Park and American Psycho (1991), while others derided it as boring or self-indulgent.
[7][8][9][10] Prior to publication, Ellis had been convinced by his persuasive editor to remove some of the more graphic lines from Imperial Bedrooms' torture scenes, which he later regretted.
Julian Wells, who was a male prostitute in Less than Zero, has become an ultra-discreet high-class pimp representing struggling young actors who do not wish to tarnish future careers.
Clay attempts to romance Rain Turner, a gorgeous young woman auditioning for a role in his new film, leading her on with the promise of being cast, all the while knowing she will never get the part because of her complete lack of acting skills.
Over the course of their relationship, he is stalked by unknown persons driving a Jeep and is frequently reminded by various individuals of the grisly murder of a young producer whom he knew.
To Bill Eichenberger, this shows how "the children have become the parents, writing scripts and producing movies, still imprisoned by Hollywood's youth and drug cultures – but now looking at things from the outside in.
"[6] The Los Angeles Times notes how Clay "shares biographical details with Ellis", a successful party-boy, who in 1985 was "often conflated with his fictional counterpart.
[3] As in Zero, Clay has stagnated in an impassive and jaded state, abusing alcohol and sedatives such as ambien, "living with a kind of psychic "locked-in" syndrome.
Clay, who "felt betrayed by Less than Zero", uses Imperial Bedrooms to make a stand or a case for himself, though ultimately "reveals himself to be far worse than the author of Less Than Zero ever began to hint at.
She further argues that the novel's motif of facial recognitions amounts to the message that people should be read "at face value", and that furthermore, past action is the greatest indicator of future behaviour, leaving no room for "change, growth, [or] self-reinvention".
[22] For the most part, the novel is written in Ellis' trademark writing style; Lawson refers to this as "sexual and narcotic depravities in an emotionless tone."
[24] Imperial Bedrooms opens with an acknowledgement from Clay, the main character, that both the Less than Zero novel and its film adaptation are actual representational works within the narrative of his life: "The movie was based on a book by someone we knew...
[5] The device also allows the novelist to insert self-critique; The Sunday Times reviewer notes that Imperial Bedrooms finds its characters "still a little sore at their depiction as inarticulate zombies".
[24] John Crace, in his "digested read" of Imperial Bedrooms, insinuates through parody that "the author" of the metafictional Less than Zero is also meant to be Ellis, describing him in Clay's voice as "too immersed in the passivity of writing and too pleased with his own style to bother with many commas to admit it so he wrote me into the story as the man who was too frightened to love.
"[5] Asked about the motif and "casual approach to" bisexual characters in his novels, continued in Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis stated he "really [didn't] know", and that he wished he could provide "an answer – depicting [him] as extremely conscious of those choices".
"[16] Another review found that the celebrity setting, as visited before in his novel Glamorama (1998), allows Ellis to make a number of observations about contemporary pop culture via Clay, such as when he asserts "that exposure can ensure fame".
The latter review accused Ellis of falling flat, attracting negative comparison to Martin Amis; both have "a flair for such perfect, surreal description" but "struggle to set it in an effective context.
[11] This book has its share of horror, not least a series of gangland slayings, but then dead bodies are to a Bret Easton Ellis novel what aspidistras are to George Orwell's: part of the scenery.
Touching on its personal qualities, Shone notes "If Lunar Park unspooled the atrocities of American Psycho back to their source, Imperial Bedrooms pulls the thread further and reaches Less Than Zero".
"[5] San Francisco Chronicle hails Imperial Bedrooms as "the very definition of authorly meta: Ellis is either so deeply enmeshed in his own creepy little insular world that he can't write his way out of it, or else he is such a genius that he's created an entire parallel universe that folds and unfolds on itself like some kind of Escher print.
[24] Commenting on its self-referential aspects, Janelle Brown of the San Francisco Chronicle recommends "for his next endeavor, Ellis should stop worrying and start looking for the exit of his own personal rabbit hole.
With regards to the novel's writing style, he comments "The first-person sentences run on and on, but the individual sections of the book are nothing if not minimal... ghastly narcissism or not, Bret Easton Ellis has a fictional territory all his own and, heaven forbid, a mastery there.
Dallas News poses the question, whether Imperial Bedrooms is "a story anyone is interested in anymore", because Ellis' "blunt, spare, journal-entry prose" is no longer, in 2010, "the backstage pass" it once was to the lives of "LA's rich and famous".
Furthermore, Tom Maurstrad argues that since the 1980s, that decade has become a "go-to bargain bin for retro-trends and ready-made nostalgia, easy to package into fashion lines and TV shows".
The review bemoans that the novel's theme, the dark side of Hollywood, is no longer a culture-shocking revelation, and that Ellis fails to capitalize on the narratorial conceit which it opens with.
Ellis wisely "appropriates the unblinking brutality [of]... American Psycho, to add some dramatic heft to this anorexic update", making the sequel a "celebrity snuff film" to the earlier "backstage pass".
"[23] The Boston Globe reviewer opined that "Ellis is aiming for noir, for the territory of James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler, but ends up with an XXX-rated episode of Melrose Place.
However, remembering the adaptation process Less than Zero went through, he admits "I've learned to be cautious about saying oh they'll never turn this dark depraved character into any sort of interesting Mulholland Drive, David Lynch kind of movie, but I could be totally wrong about that.