It’s a beautiful day, Bret Easton Ellis.

Let me start by saying: my first love is literature. Rob’s first love is war history, artifacts, photos, and films. Sadly, it would seem C+C got our sloppy seconds.

I’m hyperventilating. And not because earlier today, I almost pre-ordered my own copy when I was purchasing my mom’s Mother’s Day present! I opted out of the “one for me, one for you” present-buying mentality I usually operate under, and right-ho! Having two copies would not have been a sin. But because…

I just found out that I won a signed copy of the new novel by my hero, and favorite author—Bret Easton Ellis.

This is amazing.

If you haven’t pre-ordered yours, get on it. Kindle readers (like myself)—you can pre-order, too. This is going to be a good one. At this juncture, I know only the first line of the book: “They had made a movie about us.” Genius, from the genius behind the best first lines ever.

And now, a brief retrospective:

First Lines of B.E.E. Novels

Less Than Zero: “People are afraid to merge in Los Angeles.” [a scent. a whiff. ]

The Rules of Attraction: “and it’s a story that might bore you but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin’s room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend’s place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie.” [brutal, like the rest of the novel. I lent this book to friends and they’d never mention it again. I think I scared them with it.]

American Psycho: “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.” [remember the moment first reading this line, floating into the shady corner of our pool in FL, folding back the fresh, tight binding, with a pit of dread and excitement in my stomach.]

Glamorama: “Specks—specks all over the third panel, see?—no, that one—the second one up from the floor and I wanted to point this out to someone yesterday but a photo shoot intervened and Yaki Nakamari or whatever the hell the designer’s name is—a master craftsman not— mistook me for someone else so I couldn’t register the complaint, but, gentlemen—and ladies—there they are: specks, annoying, tiny specks, and they don’t look accidental but like they were somehow done by a machine—so I don’t want a lot of description, just the story, streamlined, no frills, the lowdown: who, what, where, when and don’t leave out why, though I’m getting the distinct impression by the looks on your sorry faces that why won’t get answered—now, come on, goddamnit, what’s the story?” [I was so fascinated by the continued references to specks and confetti in this novel I used it in an argument against a total Philistine in a literature class in college and walked out with an A+ at the end of the semester.]

Lunar Park: “You do an awfully good impression of yourself.” [loved so much, I stole it here. the best part of reading this book was the sound of children’s laughter floating on the breeze, as I read most of it on a blanket in Congress Park. If you read it, you’ll find that hysterical/really effed up.]

So, get excited:

Ellis explores what disillusioned youth looks like 25 years later in this brutal sequel to Less Than Zero. Clay, now a screenwriter, returns at Christmas to an L.A. that looks and operates much as it did 25 years ago. Trent is now a producer and married to Clay’s ex, Blair, while Julian runs an escort service and Rip, Clay’s old dealer, has had so much plastic surgery he’s unrecognizable. While casting a script he’s written, Clay falls for a young, untalented actress named Rain Turner, and his obsession and affair with her powers him through an alcoholic haze that swirls with images of death, mysterious text messages, and cars lurking outside his apartment. The story takes on a creepy noirish bent—with Clay as the frightened detective who doesn’t really want to know anything—as it barrels toward a conclusion that reveals the horror that lies at the center of a tortured soul. Ellis fans will delight in the characters and Ellis’s easy hand in manipulating their fates, and though the novel’s synchronicity with Zero is sublime, this also works as a stellar stand-alone.

Sorry for the brief departure. I’m just excited like a fat kid in a candy shop. Read some outstanding quotes from Lunar Park in this old post. And speaking of Bret, I usually think of Jay McInerney in conjunction with him, who wrote one of Rob’s favorites, A Hedonist in the Cellar. You should probably investigate this post Rob wrote: To really ______ a wine.

-Carey