I’ve recently been suffering from a fever. No, not that kind of fever. I’ve been struck with a Thomas Kinkade fever! Yes, the less-than-esteemed painter of shopping mall schlock (before the fall of malls) and the bane of snotty critics recoiling at the satiated bad tastebuds of Americans enamored with all those little queasily quaint houses in enchanted forests. Whew…just looking at those fences dripping with wisteria, cobblestone paths, and ponds filled with swans is enough to make me ooze with kitsch-inspired flop sweat. My temples burn as bright as Kinkade’s perpetually illuminated cabins in his mystical landscapes. Just how high were their monthly electric bills?!

I was infected with this Kinkade sickness, from which I’ll never recover until I can get a major museum to host a Kinkade retrospective (Whitney? I’m looking at you!), through reading writer and artist Jordan Sullivan’s perfectly titled (after the three B’s made famous in that holiday masterpiece Bad Santa) novel Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking, recently published by Amygdala Books. Between descriptions of the depraved antics of the rich, famous, and powerful, largely in the decrepit remains of chain restaurants or high-end real estate, from Tyler Perry’s aspirational Brentwood house of snakes to trysts with Ryan Seacrest in an abandoned Benihana bathroom to pudding-loving Meatball Ron DeSantis giving the stink-eye to Leo DiCaprio at Obama’s half-birthday party at—where else?—Houlihan’s, Sullivan drops several motivational quotes from Kinkade himself. Take, for instance, this excerpt from Thomas Kinkade’s Pillowbook:

“The houses I paint are on fire that’s why the motherfuckers r so full of light. Everyone in the house is burnin’ the fuck up, and yes I believe there are people inside all the houses I paint. They burning alive just like me…just like u : ) Fuck this shit. Goodbye!”

Moving. And in case you were misinformed about the self-proclaimed Painter of Light, Thom also corrects this assumption:

“Don’t you see it’s not light I’m painting it’s darkness? I paint pitch black night. Those aren’t flowers those are weeds. Fuck it all!”

Fuck it all, indeed. It should go without saying that these wonderfully antisocial quotes didn’t actually come from Kinkade but does it matter? I want them to be real! And they very much could have been. After going Kinkade-cuckoo, I took a quick jaunt over to Wikipedia where I learned this Painter of Light had a real dark side! Especially when he was boozing! A notable incident includes disrupting a Siegfried & Roy show to holler, “Codpiece! Codpiece!” until his mama calmed him down. As Media Arts Group executive John Dandois reflected on Kinkade’s drinking escapades: “Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn’t tell where the boundary was, and then he became very incoherent, and he would start cussing and doing a lot of weird stuff.” Sounds like a good time to me!

More than just an excuse to revel in Thomas Kinkade acting bad, I do so because it reveals just how closely the fucked-up, absurdist fictions contained within Sullivan’s Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking mirror reality. Sure, hair swoop icon Justin Bieber may not have a secret Twitter account in which he blames Bush for 9/11, Hillary for Benghazi, and suggests Bush Sr. pulled the trigger on JFK. But how surprised would you be if he did? Not very, I assume. It’s a short trip from being baptized by Hillsong Church’s now-fallen “rockstar preacher” Carl Lentz in NBA player Tyson Chandler’s bathtub and tweet-musing about investing in Brad Pitt’s dream of opening “a youth hostel in North Korea that caters to republican vegan backpackers.” In fact, the former reads exactly like one of the ridiculous scenarios imagined by Sullivan. And herein lies the dual joy and horror of Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking. While it may be, without question, the most hilariously dumb book I’ve read in a bit (and I want to emphasize that I say this with the utmost admiration and amusement), Sullivan’s celebrity-populated, trash media-soaked, Little Saint James-vacationing, CIA conspiracy-weaving, late capitalism dumpster fire in novel form is of our own American making. We have no one to blame but ourselves for the world we inhabit.

Of course, calling Sullivan’s delightfully nihilistic book a novel is a bit of a stretch. Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking is the literary incarnation of lewd graffiti carved on the door of a bathroom stall in a Wendy’s in Dayton, Ohio, a location that is consequently a setting for a berserk scene featuring Channing Tatum sobbing in a k-hole. Bringing up restroom graffiti doesn’t come out of nowhere either. Some pages in the book are covered with unhinged chicken-scratch as if scribbled in a fit by a mentally unstable child, including, naturally, some cartoonish dicks. Beyond the manic scrawl, Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking is a feverish conglomeration of images and writing styles. How else to represent the fractured, fragmented, and deeply unwell psyche of contemporary America?! We aren’t exactly the country for beautifully constructed, grammatically correct prose. There are random one-liners (“Phil Donahue was a communist”), excerpts from bizarro interviews with Magic Johnson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Eddie Furlong, heartfelt conversations between Jeffrey Epstein and Leon Black, abandoned scripts by Matthew Perry set in a Burlington Coat Factory, and lists of celebrities in the CIA (Chet Hanks). These textual hallucinations are interspersed with random images of a dweeby young Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein’s beefy cellmate, and purple dino Barney looking like he’s having a stroke. It’s as if Sullivan snorted up our cultural carnival and spewed it back up again on the page like Steve-O taking a honk of wasabi and immediately puking in Jackass: The Movie.

And that’s before even getting into the final hundred pages of the book, given over to “Excerpts from the Secret Twitter Account of Justin Drew Bieber,” announced with OJ Simpson’s notorious mugshot (Don’t ask me why). With the Twitter handle @stephendedlaus666, maybe-Biebs documents his life, including his ongoing love-hate relationship and collaboration with Tom Hanks (who he calls Tanks) on a film about the CIA. Between gushing about Tanks and dangling him over a balcony, @stephendedlaus666 vomits up douchebag phrases (“WELCOME TO MY MINDDDDD”), doles out LA real talk (“Hollywood is darker than DC #trust”), exposes his familial trauma (“The last thing my grandfather told me right before he was bludgeoned to death was—Don’t ever be ashamed of being called a cocksucker”), records his daily dalliances (“Saw a snuff film”), thinks about life’s bigger questions (“Are poor people there when no one is looking?”), and just simply blurts out “Kate Bush!” Perhaps my favorite posts by Bieber’s secret account, though, are his deranged haikus, some of which are pitch-perfect reflections of contemporary America. Take, for example:

“Kids scream as grown man
Punches woman in the face
At Disneyland horror show”

Disney brawls make me want to spontaneously belt out our national anthem too.

Whether undercover Bieber feeling patriotic about how quickly he received a butt plug from Amazon (“We live in the greatest country!”), haikus about priests selling crack, or an unseen film by Baz Luhrmann called “The Asseaters,” Sullivan’s novel is undoubtedly for a very specific subset of us with a cracked sense of humor tied with a sicko appreciation for the worst our society has to offer. It goes without saying, then, that not every reader is going to giggle at this evocative imagery: “Megan Markle poolside at the Chateau Marmont reading Ulysses while across the pool, under a lemon tree, a rat eats a dead pigeons ass.” Is it puerile? Sure. But is it cackle-in-public-while-reading funny? Absolutely. I know I did. Naturally, I’ve long believed the only way to cope when you’re stuck on this unending trash culture thrill ride manned by dementia-ridden octogenarians bankrolled by billionaire corporate scammers is to laugh. Sullivan seems to think so too. In a recent interview with American Vulgaria, he explains, “Writing and making art is what saves me—that’s where I can express this shit, hopefully make someone laugh or vomit. I guess the ultimate goal is to write a book or paint a picture that makes someone shit his pants.” Talk about ambition!

With this uproarious take on American idiocracy, Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking immediately reminded me of Cumwizard69420’s artwork. Whereas I previously described Cumwizard’s exhibition The Americans at Cheim & Read as shitposting on canvas, Sullivan’s book is likewise shitposting as literature. There’s a reason why Cumwizard comes to mind. Sullivan also makes satirical paintings that mine similar subjects from celebrities to those infamously well-connected international sex traffickers, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. In fact, in a recent exhibition at MRKT Gallery, also entitled Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking, Sullivan displayed a painting of Ghislaine advertising her Masterclass in Grooming. As seen in his own art, as well as in the novel, Sullivan, like Cumwizard, doesn’t take political sides. Everyone is equally implicated: Obama and DeSantis, Bill Clinton and Roy Moore, Bill Gates and the CEO of Dow Chemical who grabs a McDonald’s burger “while looking out the windshield, thinking about weed and pussy. Later that afternoon he oversees a large shipment of Agent Orange to Vietnam.”

And the narrator of the book itself. Though most of Sullivan’s novel is given over to observations like “Can a dead body fart?”, moments of fatalistic honesty and existential dread break through such as “Maybe the real problem with life is that we know we’re alive” or “Being alive really makes me not want to be a person.” Depressing, sure, but it is true that consciousness amidst this hypermediated, economically stratified shit show can feel more like a curse than a blessing. It’s these slipped-in statements, particularly the latter, which is distinctly not from Bieber’s secret Twitter alter ego, that give the sense that this wacko text is being penned by an actual person—a singular voice at the other end of this screed. Clearly, someone who finally snapped and began speaking in tabloid tongues.

What does it all mean? Maybe nothing! And that’s where the book’s nihilism comes in. As Sullivan recently said in American Vulgaria, “I don’t think there’s any moral to this story.” I’d disagree. Somewhat. Like Drew Buxton captured our United States of Scammers in So Much Heart, Sullivan’s novel holds a mirror up to how truly ridiculous and ultimately empty American society has become, from celebrity obsession to consumer culture to our politics and their pedo honeypot bedfellows like Epstein. And how this somewhat democratic, mostly oligarch-run experiment has brought everyone within its borders to the brink. Even the presence of Thomas Kinkade himself, a painter selling tacky nostalgia for an idyllic fantasy, speaks to a certain baked-in American yearning to fork over a lot of cash to return to better days that never actually existed, like Florida’s boomer paradise The Villages.

What Sullivan doesn’t offer, however, is relief. While Oscar Wilde may have been in the gutter looking at the stars, Sullivan, like the rest of us, sits in the gutter sifting through the muck. There’s no end in sight, no solution, no transcendence, no way out. Just laugh, throw up your hands, and find somewhere to scrawl:

“EARTH IS HELL
ENTERTAINMENT IS HELL
professionals ruin everything
666 :)”