The Informers - Softcover

Ellis, Bret Easton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679743243 ISBN 13: 9780679743248

Publisher: Vintage, 1995

Synopsis

The basis of the major motion picture starring Billy Bob Thornton, KimBasinger and Mickey Rourke, The Informers is a seductive and chillingly nihilistic novel, in which Bret Easton Ellis, returns to Los Angeles, the city whose moral badlands he portrayed so unforgettably in Less Than Zero. This time is the early eighties. The characters go to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. They have sex with the same boys and girls and buy from the same dealers. In short, they are connected in the only way people can be in that city.

Dirk sees his best friend killed in a desert car wreck, then rifles through his pockets for a last joint before the ambulance comes. Cheryl, a wannabe newscaster, chides her future stepdaughter, “You're tan but you don't look happy.” Jamie is a clubland carnivore with a taste for human blood. As rendered by Ellis, their interactions compose a chilling, fascinating, and outrageous descent into the abyss beneath L.A.'s gorgeous surfaces.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer [and] American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel...Written out of the American tradition -- the novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly...A seminal book."

-- Fay Weldon, Washington Post

"What's rarely said in all the furor over this novel is that it's a satire, a hilarious, repulsive, boring, seductive, deadpan satire...Ellis is, first and last, a moralist. Under cover of his laconic voice, every word in his three novels to date springs from grieving outrage at our spiritual condition... Ambition alone sets it apart from most contemporary fiction. Prudes, squares and feminist commissars aside, the rest of us should applaud Brat Easton Ellis for setting out in this noble and dangerous direction."

-- Henry Bean, front page, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious ambitious, inspiring piece of writing, which has large elements of Jane Austen at her vitriolic best. An important book."

-- Katherine Dunn

"A great novel. What Emerson said about genius, that it's the return of one's rejected thoughts with an alienated majesty, holds true for American Psycho...There is a fever to the life of this book that is, in my reading, unknown in American literature."

-- Michael Tolkin

"The first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes...[Ellis] is showing older authors where the hands have come to on the clock...He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novels try for that anymore."

-- Norman Mailer, Vanity Fair

From the Inside Flap:

This powerful and poignant novel of L.A., from the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, depicts a generation's overwhelming dissatisfaction with the way things are, and its insistence on remaining as detached and isolated as possible.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679743243
• ISBN 13: 9780679743248
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 225