Less Than Zero

In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis shocked the literary world with his debut novel, a work that has since become an iconic cult classic and a chilling embodiment of the 1980s zeitgeist.

Published when Ellis was just twenty-one, Less Than Zero is more than a genre-defining debut; it is a landmark of contemporary fiction that continues to resonate with successive generations. Narrated by Clay, an eighteen-year-old student returning home to Los Angeles for his Christmas break, the novel offers an unflinching look at a world of extreme privilege and profound spiritual emptiness.

Moving through a landscape of seamy bars, glamorous nightclubs, and wild, drug-fueled parties, Clay and his circle of friends drift through dispassionate sexual encounters and relentless hedonism. Ellis's prose is famously detached, refusing to either condone or chastise the behavior of his characters. The result is a fierce, brutal coming-of-age story that explores the inexorable consequences of moral depravity and the alienation of a youth culture with "nowhere to go."