Mountain Devil

Recommend: No.

This was the final Bret Easton Ellis book for me to read out of his eight novels. It’s difficult to talk about why I love BEE when he is at his best because his best showcases the worst in society. There is a disaffection boarding on psychotic that is prolific in his writing and you are often unsure which edge of this balance his characters teeter on. You are constantly searching for something relatable in these characters because on the surface their life mirrors yours – where you eat, what you buy, the music you listen to, the movies you watch – but the emptiness in their relationships is so brutal that this search always comes up blank.

The Informers has traces of BEE at his best: sardonic, unexpected, untethered. The content is identical to his other novels (follows a group of wealthy LA teenagers and those knitted into their lives) but structurally The Informers sits alone in his bibliography. Each chapter is from a new person’s perspective, and they don’t always reappear in subsequent chapters.

It is kind of fun to figure out where each person sits in relation to each other, as in true BEE style they are all only vaguely involved with each other. It’s a challenge to decipher who is the mother of who; who is the dead friend of who; who is the vampiric ex-schoolmate of who. The reward for unpicking the connections is addictively underwhelming because there’s no grand unifying moment, and BEE plays with the knowledge that you’re expecting one. Each relationship has the same qualities – whether it be between friends, between a dealer and a client or between a father and son – all are equally tenuous. This allows BEE to get away with such a fragmented narrative approach. You can follow a character for ten pages or a hundred, there’s no enhanced insight the longer you spend with them.

There are two stand out chapters for me. In the first, a father and son are on a mini-holiday in Hawaii. They have nothing to say to each other and spend the whole time being disgusted with each other in the same ways they were disgusted with each other back in LA. The second is a brief story about a girl taking a cross-country train journey to attend the wedding of her father. Of course, the soon-to-be new wife is a hot mess.

These two stories are appealing because at their core they are a departure from classic BEE. Neither feature any violence. Neither are set in LA. In both real people confront the disappointments in their life. The stakes are so low in these stories, which is a marked departure from the intensity of later chapters. When I’m in the middle of the story about a vampire skinning and bleeding out college girls, I’m yearning for those easier, melancholy times of the earlier chapters.

I adore this scene from the second of the aforementioned stories, where our college-age female narrator pleads (in a rare show of emotion from a BEE character) with her stoner brother on the phone to intervene in the clearly disastrous re-marriage of her father.

“Aren’t you going to talk to him?” I ask. “Aren’t you going to do something about this?”

“Oh man.” I can hear Graham inhale, then blow something out, slowly. His voice drops three octaves. “Like what?”

“Just… talk to him.”

“I don’t even like him,” Graham says.

“You said, Graham, you said…” I’m on the verge of tears. I swallow, try to control myself. “You said she has seen Flashdance nine times.” I start sobbing quietly, biting my fist. “You said it was her” – pause – “favourite movie.”

It’s delightful to later learn in an offhand aside in someone else’s story that Graham (the brother) has slept with his step-mum.

The more I write this review, the more I like this flawed novel. The good bits are just so good, and they are refreshing. But then there are stretches of bland, hyper violent stories that lead no-where. I particularly dislike “The Fifth Wheel” about… well… I still don’t really know what it is about. It’s just an excuse to torture and rape a child? Also, this book seems excessively racist. It doesn’t sit well. I can’t bring myself to recommend The Informers. It missteps too frequently and the parts that are memorable feel specific and probably don’t hold general appeal.

The novel ends with a sort-of couple who are having an affair on a visit to a downtrodden zoo. The following scene is so perfectly the conclusion of the novel. The girl is infatuated (for reasons unknown) with this married, and frankly very disappointing, man and is pleading for him to leave his wife.

“Bruce,” I start. “Did you tell her?”

We move to a bench. It has become overcast but it’s still hot and windy and Bruce smokes another cigarette and says nothing.

“I want to talk to you,” I say, grabbing his hands, squeezing them, but they lie there limply, lifeless in his lap.

“Why do they give some animals big cages and some not?” he wonders.

“Bruce. Please.” I start crying. The bench has suddenly become the centre of the universe.

“The animals remind me of things I can’t explain,” he says.

“Bruce.” I choke.

I swiftly move a hand up to his face, touching his cheek gently, pressing.

He takes my hand and pulls it away from him and holds it between us on the bench and he quickly tells me, “Listen – my name is Yocnor and I am from the planet Archanoid and it is located in a galaxy that Earth has not yet discovered and probably never will. I have been on your planet according to your time for the past four hundred thousand years and I was sent here to collect behavioural data which will enable us to eventually take over and destroy all other existing galaxies, including yours. It will be a horrible month, since Earth will be destroyed in increments and there will be suffering and pain on a level your mind will never be able to understand. But you will not experience this demise first-hand because it will occur in Earth’s twenty-fourth century and you will be dead long before that. I know you will find this hard to believe but for once I am telling you the truth. We will never speak of this again.” He kisses my hand, then looks back at the zebra and at the child wearing a CALIFORNIA T-shirt, still standing there, waving at the animal.

To me, this says it all, everything BEE has ever tried to say.