The Informers

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. 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 L.A. - suffering from nothing less than the death of the soul. 'A writer at the peak of his powers . . . The book takes us from the first to the seventh circles of hell, from Salinger to De Sade' Will Self 'The Informers is spare, austere, elegantly designed, telling in detail, coolly ferocious, sardonic in its humour; every vestige of authorial sentiment is expunged' New York Times 'A spare and hypnotic prose style which beats out these lives of quiet desperation with a slow pulse as gentle as it is compelling . . . Ellis has been compared to Fitzgerald and here we see why' Modern Review