Midway through Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 novel Less Than Zero, you really get the chills. The irony is that for such a sunny, young, glossy backdrop—Los Angeles in the Reagan 80’s—Ellis's characters' constant coke use, crime, and transient apathy form a cognitive dissonance with the novel's setting and cultural connotations that eventually reaches a fever pitch of intense horror that at once transcends and belies the author's infamously detached tone. Quite possibly one of the most controversial works of popular literature ever successfully delivered to the public at large, Less Than Zero, despite its listless, unashamedly affected grotesqueness which has lead critics to challenge its literary legitimacy, is undoubtedly a gut-crushing work of fiction: that’s the only thing, maybe, that makes a book great.

As a Bret Easton Ellis “fan boy” of sorts, I may be a little biased. Sure, maybe I too write racy stories, and just validate Ellis’s work to surreptitiously validate my own—maybe, yeah, I’m just an East Coast rip-off, and maybe, yeah, I haven’t done enough drugs or driven enough fast cars to capture the conceitedly beautiful postmodern James Dean aesthetics of Ellis’s novels. But, Jesus Christ! Less Than Zero made me feel both a starving need to write and a starving need to never, ever write—or feel anything, damn it—ever again. I was so disturbed by the last third of the novel, with its gruesome rapes, forced heroin injections, bloody dope noses, and twelve year-old girls in bondage, that for the next few days all I could do was sit on the couch, watch bad TV, and feel numb. And even though I was temporarily, thoughtlessly, cathartically glued to the screen, I couldn’t even stomach sexy shows like “12 Hottest Jobs in Vegas” or “40 Hottest Actresses Blah Blah,” the typical sedentary-TV-watching-binge shit; when, in the prime of your virility, the most base human instinct doesn’t appeal to you, because of a fucking book for god’s sake, you know that the author did something right….or terribly wrong, depending on how you look at it. But don’t listen to the curmudgeon critics, or the Puritans for that matter. Less Than Zero is an opus of angst that’s just as prescient twenty-five years later. Trust my experience, it's still paralyzingly brilliant. 

And, I mean, Less Than Zero sets the “contemporary-disaffected-postmodern-youth” genre bar so high that, unless you want to write horror stories with naked babes and dinners at Spago, there’s really nothing you can do to compete with Ellis. So I guess my chilling listlessness from finishing his breakthrough novel put me in my place as an aspiring novelist: it was no coincidence that I had been arrogantly saving Less Than Zero for my sophomore winter break from college, a time when I knew that I would be working on a slew of short stories and a burgeoning novella which I thought was pretty good; this break was around same the time that Ellis, too, was writing his "pretty good" short novel that would rocket him to fame. He finished it when he was twenty-one, so, of course it’s brash, but, fuck, I thought that I was brash. Did I need more heroin in my short stories? What was I doing wrong? I momentarily feared that I had been beaten at my own game, until I, uh, realized that it wasn't my game after all, it was his: I wasn't even alive in 1985!

One of my high school English teachers and creative writing mentors—who actually at one point, in a boldly honest and dedicatedly literary move, taught Less Than Zero in his junior year honors English curriculum until too many scared, small-minded soccer moms whined to the administration—would probably try to dissuade a young creative writer from amping up his stories with coke and heroin (literally or figuratively): he’d say that “shock and awe” devices work, but are usually cheap gambles. So how did Ellis pull it off when he was our age? Was it just because no one had really done it yet (but what about Burroughs and Wolfe and, well, everyone else that dared to step out of the "Drug Abuse Resistance Education" norm)?

So, to every other college creative writer out there, I hope that you read Less Than Zero, and I hope that it puts you in your place like it put me in mine. And I hope that you get so creeped out by the scene of that twelve year-old boy getting castrated with a chainsaw that you realize, like I did after a few days of absent-mindedly watching “Austin Powers” constantly rerun on TNT after finishing the novel because I just couldn't bring myself to think, yeah, I hope that you realize that you are too much beat at the ol’ game of “yo, our society is fucked up, man” suburban angst stories that all you really want to do or have to do is write your story. Be yourself, because I doubt you're as fucked up as Less Than Zero's characters like Clay, Blair, Rip, and Kim. I know I'm not, no matter how hard I try to seem like it. Steal Ellis’s brilliant tone—it’s still in the vogue after all—but remember…the gut-crushing postmodern grotesque has already been written. Note to self: give up!