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Today in weird connections between books: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.

I mean, I guess the real connection between these two books is the 1980s in Los Angeles – Less than Zero was originally published in 1985, and Parable of the Sower in 1993. So they come out of a similar time and space. Maybe there was something in the air?

Less than Zero is about the nihilism of a group of (rich, white) drug-addicted teenagers, just after their first year of college. These kids are aimless, addicted to drugs and sex, and looking for thrills wherever they can get them, but they are still completely disconnected from the larger world around them. The narrator of the book seems to be totally dissociated from everything, floating through Los Angeles while he’s home on winter break.

Towards the end of Less than Zero, a group of young men has kidnapped a young Black girl and, it is implied, kill her on camera for the thrill of sharing it. It’s abhorrent, and it’s supposed to be.

Parable of the Sower explores what happens when the United States falls apart in the future. (It was the future when she wrote it, but it started in 2024, so it’s now!) It’s about a family that, at one point, is attacked by a band of roving teenage boys, high on an unnamed drug, who run rampant through their neighborhood, killing and raping, and stealing. It’s unclear if they need what they take, or if they’re just bent on destruction.

But I read Parable of the Sower and thought: oh, I know these boys. These are the same people that Bret Easton Ellis wrote about. This is the consequence, told from the victim’s point of view.

These boys, these people, looking for thrills, have been here, have always been here. That’s not to dismiss them; they were destructive in both of those books, they are destructive in real life, and they always have been.

I don’t know that I have a real conclusion, aside from: look at these two books, published eight years apart from two authors I wouldn’t have thought to group together, showing the same thing.

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PixPixPix is a slim story of a chapter, a vignette of fifth graders in 1978 attempting to call into a television station to play a video game on air after school. I couldn’t help but ask “Why is this chapter even in here? It’s not about the band, it’s not about New York City specifically, and yes, it’s a great capture of what elementary school kids did after school before the internet and overachievers and helicopter parents, but how, specifically does it relate to The Beastie Boys’ story?”

But the answer came almost immediately. Luc Sante’s chapter is big and sweeping and it would be incredibly easy to position the band as being savants somehow, destined by their gifts and the era to become the stars they eventually became. PixPixPix is about showing they were goofy, dumb kids just being themselves. No one was destined for anything. It’s about having fun, not about any sweeping grand pronouncements.

It lets you know that fun is the important thing in this story.

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