Two summers ago, I re-read Bret Easton Ellis’ novel “Less Than Zero.” I wanted to revisit the 1985 novel before I read Ellis’ newest book “Imperial Bedrooms,” which is a sequel to the tale of L.A. excess.

The library had a long waiting list for the book, and I never got around to buying a copy. Eventually, it fell off my radar. A couple of weeks ago, I wandered around the library as my wife and daughter looked for their books and saw a copy of “Imperial Bedrooms” on the shelf and had to grab it.

Now I’m not sure if that was such a good idea after all. In my review of “Less Than Zero” in 2010, I said:

The one thing I realized from re-reading the book is that Ellis simultaneously managed to produce something vapid and ground breaking. I forgot the absurd excess of the characters framed by Ellis’ flowing prose. You could almost feel yourself moving along, herky jerky, with these lost souls.

“Imperial Bedrooms” has the prose and the herky-jerky feel, but you don’t really know why you should care. The original featured lost teenagers in a hedonistic society which left them to fend for themselves with no moral compass. The sequel simply shows that they are still shallow jerks. And that’s on a good day.

Ellis could probably write about this cast in his sleep, and 180-some pages later, it appears as he did. The book felt like a lazy gimmick. Simply showing that people with problems never solved those problems and went on to worse problems because that’s the kind of world they live in does not count as character development.

This disdain doesn’t even get into the eye-rolling climax which not only left me wondering what had happened, but what the previous pages actually meant. I could only shake my head and quote Josh Baskin: “I don’t get it.”

The good thing is that Ellis’ ability as a writer provides a quick pace and manages to get to the point, whatever it is, in less than 200 pages. I don’t really recommend “Imperial Bedrooms,” but if you give it a shot, it shouldn’t take up too much of your time. Frankly, I’d just suggest reading “Less Than Zero” twice.