The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis

“I’m really thinking seriously about staying out here a little longer. I’ve sort of forgotten what New York and Camden look like and I’ve forgotten a lot of faces from there and I don’t know if I can face going back. I probably won’t stay here but I’ve been thinking about it. I’m dreading seeing those people who I called my friends. I’d rather stay out here and not, as you so often put it, ‘deal with it,’ y’know?”

The Los Angeles of Bret Easton Ellis is bronzed, hazy and smoke-filled. His New York is a cold, neon-lit nightclub. The characters that inhabit his numerous novels rarely fully explain their motives. Instead, Bret holds his audience captive through the sparseness of his writing. Typical themes of love get pushed aside in order to examine the angst found within our society.

The Informers is Bret Easton Ellis’s 1994 collection of short stories that further explores the motifs he set up in Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. The thirteen stories contained within are full of drug use, 1980’s pop references, drifters and despair for tomorrow’ ills. There is a sense of primacy to his writing that by the time this book was publishing.

The characters feel alien to the typical reader, but that is the point. They exist within a reality that at first seems very real, yet we don’t have access. In one story the protagonist is the front man for the group “Bryan Metro” attempting to re-launch his career undeterred by his destructive sexual habits. In another, a couple attempts to enjoys a date at the zoo despite the underlying tension hinted at between the two.

Perhaps, the best example of Ellis’s style of writing is the story “Letters from L.A.” The narrator takes the reader through the corruption of morality that generates the characters inhabiting his novels. One gets a sense of the desire to escape this environment but the lack of willpower preventing so.

Ellis’s is not a reader that everyone can enjoy. One will not find any tales of unrequited love or adventure here – only relationships that have weathered one too many gin and tonics and cocaine. The characters feel distant. Ellis focuses his attention on the chain of events rather than the actions that led to their creation. Fans of Hemmingway would be well-suited to read at least one of Ellis’s novels in order to see how far the genre has developed since his unfortunate demise. I would recommend reading Less Than Zero before sinking into The Informers in order to get the full flavor of the L.A. he has crafted. I would also recommend avoiding the new film of the same name at all costs until long into its HBO circulation.