Imperial Bedrooms - Background

Background

The development of Imperial Bedrooms began after Ellis re-read Less Than Zero as part of the writing process for his 2005 novel, Lunar Park. The novel takes its name from Elvis Costello's 1982 album Imperial Bedroom, just as Less Than Zero had been named for a Costello single. After reading his first novel, Ellis began to reflect on what had become of the characters from Less Than Zero. Soon, he found himself "overwhelm" by the idea of what would become Imperial Bedrooms as it continually returned to him. After gestating the idea, and making "voluminous notes", his detailed outline became longer than the finished book. Ellis felt that this process of note-taking limited him to the novels that he genuinely wanted "to stay with for a couple of years". To this, he attributed having "written so few novels". Ellis's biggest influence in the course of writing Imperial Bedrooms was American novelist Raymond Chandler, "and that kind of pulpy noir fiction". He found inspiration in Chandler because "He didn't even know how some of his books ended. That's part of what makes those books existentialist masterpieces." To Ellis, "It's about a journey and a tone and style and this worldview he created." In terms of his own plotting, however, he opined that "plots really don't matter", nor solutions to mysteries, because it's "the mood that's so enthralling... kind of universal, this idea of a man searching for something or moving through this moral landscape and trying to protect himself from it, and yet he's still forced to investigate it." Part of the "impetus" behind Imperial Bedrooms, which Ellis "wrestled with", was to try and dispel the "sentimental view of Less Than Zero" that made it, to some, "an artifact of the 80s" alongside "John Hughes movies and Ray-Bans and Fast Times at Ridgemont High"; he felt he began assessing audience's reactions to his work when working on Lunar Park.

On April 14, 2009, MTV News announced that Ellis had nearly finished the novel and it would be published in May 2010. At the time, Ellis revealed that all the novel's main characters would return. Prior to publication, Ellis had been convinced by his persuasive editor to remove some of the more graphic lines from Imperial Bedrooms' torture scenes, which he later regretted. "My most extreme act of self-censoring in Imperial Bedrooms," he said, however, was to omit a three-line description of a silver wall, because he felt that Clay would never have written it. Ellis stated he had no plans to make changes to the book as it stands in a second edition. Months prior to the book's release, Ellis tweeted the first sentence of the novel, "They had made a movie about us." The Random House website later announced the on sale date of June 22, 2010 in both hardback and paperback. With it, they released a picture of the book's cover and a short synopsis, which described the book as focusing on a middle-aged Clay, now a screenwriter, drawn back into his old circle. Amidst this, Clay begins dating a young actress with mysterious ties to Julian, Rip and a recently-murdered Hollywood producer; his life begins to spin out of control. In Imperial Bedrooms, Los Angeles returns once again as the book's setting. Along with New York, where Clay has been prior to coming home, it is one of Ellis' two major locations.