 Imperial Bedrooms opens with an acknowledgement of the Less Than Zero novel and film both as actual items within the fictional history of Imperial Bedrooms ' Clay ; he describes " The movie was based on a book by someone we knew … . It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren 't changed and there was nothing in it that hadn 't happened . " The Los Angeles Times describes this as a " nifty little trick " , because it allows Ellis to establish the newer book " as the primary narrative , one that trumps Ellis as author and the real world . " The San Francisco Chronicle calls it a " neat trick of authorial self @-@ abnegation " . Another reviewer describes it as Ellis at " his most ambitious " , a " Philip Rothian , doppelgänger gambit " , making his new narrator " the real Clay " and the other an imposter . This allows Ellis to skilfully , " with writerly jujitsu " , acknowledge Robert Downey Jr . ' s popular performance as Julian in the moralistic 1987 film , in which he died ; Ellis appreciates the adaptation as a " milestone in a lot of ways " . The device also allows the novelist to insert self @-@ critique ; The Sunday Times reviewer notes that Imperial Bedrooms finds its characters " still a little sore at their depiction as inarticulate zombies " . John Crace , in his " digested read " of Imperial Bedrooms , insinuates through parody that " the author " of the metafictional Less Than Zero is also meant to be Ellis , describing him in Clay 's voice as " too immersed in the passivity of writing and too pleased with his own style to bother with many commas to admit it so he wrote me into the story as the man who was too frightened to love . " With regard to the opening narrative conceit , Ellis queries " Is it complication ... or is it clarification ? " , opining that it certainly is the latter for Clay . Though Ellis never names himself in the book , he concedes to Lawson that although " I don 't name the author " , one can " guess [ Bret Easton Ellis ] is who the Clay of Imperial Bedrooms is referring to . " Ellis told Vice that he hadn 't explicitly considered when writing the novel whether Clay was referring to him or not . Eileen Battersby comments , " Just as he did in Lunar Park ( 2005 ) , Ellis uses self @-@ consciousness as a device . " According to Vice , this conceit of self @-@ consciousness means that " Imperial Bedrooms is no mere sequel . It 's more a culmination of all of Ellis 's work " , containing " the scatological violence of American Psycho " and " the otherworldly terror of Lunar Park " . Ellis himself raises the " sequel " question , commenting " ... I don 't think it is [ a sequel ] . Well , I mean , it is and it isn 't . It 's narrated by him , sure . But I guess I could maybe have switched the names around and it could stand alone . " 
