When Less Than Zero was published in 1985, it was immediately recognized as a generational text, capturing the disaffected, pleasure-seeking nihilism of the young and wealthy in Los Angeles.
Bret Easton Ellis, only 21 at the time, wrote with a detached, affectless style that mirrored the emotional vacancy of his characters—kids with endless money, numbed by sex, drugs, and an overwhelming sense of nothing matters.
The novel’s protagonist, Clay, drifts through LA during his winter break from college, moving from party to party, bed to bed, line to line, witnessing horrors that he neither resists nor fully registers.
Almost forty years later, THE AUTHOR by The Author picks up the baton. But this time, the world is different. If Less Than Zero was the novel of the ‘80s, THE AUTHOR by The Author is the novel of the 2020s. The kids who once idled around West Hollywood, lost in their own excess, have grown up. They’ve had children. And those children—raised in the ruins of that world—are now online, performing their identities for an audience of millions.
The difference? Where Clay and his friends had the luxury of passive detachment, The Author does not. He is not drifting. He is climbing. He is not a passive witness to the horrors of Los Angeles—he is an active participant, hungry for more. He wants fame, and he is willing to do whatever it takes to get it, even if he knows it’s a vacuous pursuit.
This is the key difference between Less Than Zero and THE AUTHOR: ambition.
Ellis’s Less Than Zero is famous for its affectless tone, a style that mimics the emotional numbness of its protagonist. Clay’s narration is flat, detached, eerily calm, even as he witnesses acts of extreme violence and depravity. This narrative strategy creates a chilling effect, forcing the reader to confront the emptiness of a world where sensation has replaced meaning.
In THE AUTHOR by The Author, this stylistic influence is evident, but with a twist. The Author is not numb—he is hyper-aware. He sees through the phoniness of the both Hollywood and virtual world assembled before him, understands the transactional nature of fame (and the pursuit of fame), and uses it to his advantage. His detachment is not passive but strategic: it’s active.
While Clay drifts through his world with nihilistic apathy, The Author is an active manipulator of his own narrative––and actively allows himself to be manipulated by his environment: “It makes for a good story.” He understands that the very thing that made Clay’s world so hollow—money, sex, drugs, power—has now been replaced by something even more insidious: influence.
The Author doesn’t just consume culture; he aspires to create it, bending reality to his own ends.
This is why THE AUTHOR feels like the natural successor to Less Than Zero. If Ellis captured what it meant to be young and jaded in a world of excess, THE AUTHOR captures what it means to be young and desperate in a world of performance—while still maintaining a healthy tinge of Clay’s nihilistic removal:
If nothing matters, everything is permitted.
Both Less Than Zero and THE AUTHOR by The Author are drenched in hedonism—parties, drugs, sex, the endless search for something that feels real. But where Ellis’s novel treated this lifestyle with cold, clinical detachment, THE AUTHOR presents it as performatively seductive and absolutely necessary.
In Less Than Zero, cocaine is just there—something the characters do because there is nothing else to do. It’s not even a pleasure; it’s a routine. The same goes for sex, violence, and betrayal. Everything is rendered in the same flat tone, making it all equally meaningless.
In THE AUTHOR, drugs serve a different function: they are a means of transformation. The Author isn’t doing cocaine just because it’s there—he’s doing it because it’s part of the performance. It’s what someone in his position does, and in doing it, it transforms him into a man of action, someone who does not give a fuck, who catapults himself into the prey-or-be-preyed-upon world of Hollywood and allows himself to be pinballed around to ultimately get what he wants.
In Less Than Zero, the characters are trapped in their own nihilistic bubble, disconnected from the rest of the world. In THE AUTHOR by The Author, there is no such thing as disconnection. Every moment is a potential post, every interaction a piece of content. The Author does not simply live in Hollywood—he broadcasts it. He is performing at all times, curating himself into the person he needs to be. The absurdity of it all, of course, is that he hates this. He hates the performance as much as he understands the need for it.
Ellis’s characters were numb because they had everything. The Author is numb because he lives in a world of endless performance, where he can’t simply be what he wants (an author) but has to pretend to want to become someone else first. A world divided between the virtual and the actual, the literal and the literary, a world that rarely rewards merit and predominately rewards attention.
For THE AUTHOR by The Author, Less Than Zero serves as both a blueprint and a cautionary tale. The Author’s world is similarly hollow, but it has evolved beyond the detached cool of the ’80s into something even more insidious. If Ellis captured the disaffection of a generation raised on excess, THE AUTHOR captures the next logical step: a world where that excess is no longer enough.
Now, attention is the ultimate drug, and fame is an economy built on manufactured scandals and performative authenticity.
While Clay observes his world with a deadened, passive gaze, The Author is actively engaged in the game—both participating in and satirizing the machinery of celebrity. But at its core, both novels ask the same question: What happens when nothing means anything anymore?
