“Of coyotes and werewolves: Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero”

Abstract

To date, Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 Less than Zero has understandably lacked an ecocritical reading due to its explicit depiction of sexual violence, over-thetop consumerism, rampant drug use, vapid characters, and crippling alienation. Ellis scholarship tends, in various ways, to examine LTZ as an exploration of the emptiness of our consumption-ridden mass-media world, whether it is Freese’s entropy and the “MTV novel” (1990), Sahlin’s “existential dilemma” (1991), Young’s exploration of place in a world without moral imperatives (1992), Annesley’s “blank fiction” (1988) and, most recently, Dehghan and Sadjadi’s Baudrillardian look at consumption and media (2021). However, when we consider the numerous references to the “wild” encroaching the boundaries protecting the carefully manufactured Garden of LA in the form of tree-felling winds, torrential rains, home-destroying mudslides, scorching temperatures, and cat-eating coyotes, Ellis’s novel can be read not only as a condemnation of constructing our Western Eden in the first place, but also as a point of contact for considering Clay’s (and our) place in the posthuman world. I argue that Clay, the novel’s narrator, finds himself adrift in a world where long-accepted distinctions between inside/outside and domesticated/wild are no longer tenable in an LA which, by the 1980s, had long since lost the farmland buffer that kept the wilds of desert and mountains at bay. Without this manufactured agricultural zone shielding metropolitan LA, a new space was created in which the perceived culture/nature boundaries are traversed, heightening Clay’s sense of alienation. These crossings are most prevalent where the wild and the urban intersect in areas of flux and transition known as ecotones. According to Irene Klaver, “An ecotone is an interface between two ecosystems and is often a more complex ecosystem by combining the previous two into a new third, with its own processes and species” (46). And, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164168