A quarter-century after the events of Less Than Zero, the decadence and violent malaise which smothered the youth of that novel not only endures into middle age but has in fact intensified and worsened. A searing, metafictional portrait of emotional stuntedness and sexual violence under the pitiless SoCal sun. Clay is finally unmasked as the sociopathic bastards he always was under his faux-concerned surface (but is it really Clay?). Nothing ever changes or happens or gets better; people are tortured and murdered and masks fall off and the vacancy curdles into genuine evil as the subtext becomes text, but the environment and the people within it are as stagnant as ever. Everything means less than zero.