The biggest surprise in Gianluca Cameron’s full-blown foam-mouthed wacko novel You Know It’s Black, a book stuffed to the brim with unexpected and inexplicable brain-wringing stunners, may be the presence of filmmaker, actor, musician, unsimulated sex scene producer/anti-porn neuter, Trump supporter, and Roger Stone-rivaling Nixon fanatic Vincent Gallo. Gallo appears as the fittingly phobic one-night-stand of protagonist Eris, a The Bachelor-obsessed mouse-woman skeptic whose genitalia morphs in a quarterly cycle. How do you seduce the filmmaker with “the biggest cock in the game” as unstable private parts-sporting rodent-lady? With a nightmarish cavity-rotting junk food spread worthy of Will Ferrell’s sweet-toothed Elf, including a turkey stuffed with Nutella, Doritos, Baja Blasts, Jack and Cokes, and absinthe mixed with butterfly stomach acid (as you do…). Yum! If you’re feeling more queasy than horny, so was Gallo, who urges Eris to get on with it. Which they do, in a gravity-defying explosion of passion that leaves Eris wiping cum off a Cy Twombly with a feather duster (“A vacuum would be too forceful,” notes Cameron).

At first, it seems strange that Gallo flits in and mostly out of Cameron’s soon-to-be-ending world populated with demi-human mice, moles, a stoat named Oppenheimer, goth manatees, a prom-going part-octopus, and an anarchic group called the Pepsi militia. Yet, Gallo may be the only IRL person who belongs in this cracked universe. Not just because Christina Ricci in Buffalo ’66 is kind of a platinum-haired, blue eye-shadowed, King Crimson-dancing mouse-ingenue when you really think about it. But, with his penchant for contrarian pseudointellectual musings about politics (“The truth is, I’m reactive against protest, because I think protest comes from ego. The ugliest sound I’ve ever heard in my life was coming from an anti-war protest. The most angry, bitter voices I ever heard in my fucking life…You give more attention to inequality by protest”) or edgy blabber that wouldn’t be out of place spewed by a train crazy or Charles Manson (“I don’t trust or love anyone. Because people are all creepy. Creepy creepy creeps. Creeping around. Creeping here and creeping there. Creeping everywhere. Crippity crappity creepies”), Gallo fits right in with the rest of Cameron’s cast of crippity-crappity characters who spend the last days before the looming apocalypse upchucking extensive philosophical diatribes at each other in a delightfully schizo mix of Cormac McCarthy’s quotationless dialogue and Beckett’s absurdist stream-of-consciousness blather.

This isn’t to say nothing happens in the lunatic land of You Know It’s Black, a society long abandoned by government crooks and cops who are too busy colonizing other planets to worry about Earth’s goings-on. Eris marries her pudgy, sometimes cross-dressing mole limo driver, Beaufort. A character named Tydeus Dahl meets his female doppelganger while passively ingesting a digital diet of “sped-up construction videos, fetish content edited into an ironic point-and-laugh compilation, a video essay arguing in favor of drug use, movies summarized by neural networks, and debates over political terminology,” before resolving to embark on a killing spree. Eris is caught in an insurrection over a million-dollar Pepsi points lottery after getting in a rhetorical battle over ordering “tendies” at Chik-fil-A. She also awakes in a sculpture garden filled with furry statues in “various states of sexual ecstacy,” including, my favorite preserved position, “tired unwillingness.” There is a social media version of Mystery Science Theater that replaces Mike Nelson and his robot buddies with has-been comedians, a best-of Twitter commentary, and a burst of confetti during a screening of Paul Miller’s The Pest. Eris and Beaufort attend a horrible leftist podcaster party filled with ideologies of all stripes, including “patriotic Fisherite neo-Leninists” and “White Claw drinkers of indeterminate political outlook.” And that’s without mentioning marvels like a grumpy talking pig and a bronze sculpture of a trash bag.

Quite obviously, Cameron’s feverish, loopily constructed world is frothingly and amusingly madcap—and not all that distant from our own deteriorating society. Let’s be honest, would you be surprised if there was a riot over a Pepsi lottery? Me neither! How about a fake forest filled with hundred-hour-long bird song recordings? Nope! And I bet you’ve been to a party filled with leftist podcasters at least once! How much more insane is any of this than a rat turd virus spreading on a cruise after boomers went birding at a garbage dump (ok, I know they’re now saying the origin of the hantavirus wasn’t dump-birding, but I choose to believe)? Or the gay travel influencer stuck on the hanta-cruise now unboxing Starbucks in quarantine? Not very!

I won’t lie and say I understood what the hell was happening all of the time in You Know It’s Black. Or that the novel is an easy read. It’s not, but it’s surely an inventive one, which is a welcome relief given so much experimental fiction consists of thinly veiled accounts of the author’s own pathetic hookups. Give me an imaginative, chatty, furry dystopia instead, even if I don’t always have a clue what’s going on! Is Eris really the fursona of serial killer turned self-help guru John Cross? Or is John Cross really the creation of Eris’s own bestselling self-help book that was knocked off the New York Times list by a sappy Nicholas Sparks novel? What even is the physical reality of this society when lightning sends Eris on a roving tour? Who knows! And does it matter? Not to me! I was buckled up for the ride wherever Cameron was taking me (Speaking of rides, there’s a dash of Ari Aster absurdity here, too). It’s not as if the characters are all that clued in either. Take this exchange between Eris and Oppenheimer:

“Why is there a pig foetus taped to the ceiling?”

“Ah. Didn’t notice that. I think someone broke in.”

Kind of blasé, huh?!

Not that the surrealistic chaos surrounding them matters much since the characters spend most of their time existentially yammering with critical distance when not listening to Lou Reed’s anti-classic Metal Machine Music, watching Café Noir, or guzzling copious cans of Monster energy drink. Hell, even a heart attack is announced verbally and apologetically with a “Deeply sorry, babe. It appears I’m having a heart attack,” rather than a guttural grunt, a panicked chest clutch, and a total collapse. Sure, there is romanticism to be found, like Eris waxing poetic about Beaufort’s Bataille-esque sun/anus nose, a lovestruck swoon that only rivals Connie and Raymond Marble in filthiest-couple-alive seduction. But, mostly, their chosen subjects, rendered in page-long wall-of-text screeds, are headier, whether the folly of tech optimism; the futility of trying to change the system from within (“What’s the point in depressing people who are already circling the drain?”); or the potential of violence as critique (“Take Theodore J. Kaczynski, for example. Do you think anyone would have listened to him had he not mailed those bombs?”).

Is all of this bullshit? Sometimes. Many of the animal-people Eris meets seem to be infected with a kind of pervasive unraveling paranoia, like bear Elias ranting about being gangstalked by the FDA and concluding the world really ended in 2012 (“The asteroid killed us and we didn’t even notice”). For her part, Eris reacts with almost universal dismissal, sometimes to a hilarious extent, like her best retort, “I don’t care about what’s real. Two things are on my mind right now: rare steak and getting my ass eaten out.” Girl’s got priorities! Yet, when the theorizing hits, it hits, like this observation from Oppenheimer the stoat about AI that is worth quoting at length:

“AI writing has turned art into an organic process apart from sentient beings. The collective unconscious made of previous works that the AI draws upon brings the intellectual prison formed by rigorous cliché into the form of future text. In that sense, it is both conservative and progressive. It enforces what came before and yet is also radically new. Same thing with the plastic trees. We have reached the stage where innovation is senility. Where the world babbles in dementia of half-formed memories. Not so much the repetition and appropriation of the collagists but instead a new form of consciousness which only knows how to deform. As if the sum of our knowledge and artistry is a block of stone to be carved into a shape informed by a prompt.”

Accurate, no? But what is the point of just pointing it out? I don’t think there is one. Over and over in You Know It’s Black, the demi-humans mention the imminent end of the world, but all they do is ramble at each other as that last grand finale approaches. Which seems familiar, doesn’t it? Isn’t that exactly what we’re doing with the influx of yelly, self-important podcasts, panel discussions, debates, lectures, social media posts, and all the discourse that wile away time and mental energy while our own society devolves from the already hellish late-capitalist Gilded Age 2.0 into a humming and whirring Kevin O’Leary-built data center-strewn tech feudalist apocalypse? Maybe Elias was right when insisting, “We are all MK-Ultra victims.”