Vurt

Sometimes it feels that the whole world is smeared with Vaz.

Vurt tells the story of Scribble and his "gang", the Stash Riders, as they search for his missing sister/lover Desdemona. The novel is set in an alternate version of Manchester, England, in which society has been shaped by Vurt, a hallucinogenic drug/shared alternate reality, which one accesses by sucking on colour-coded feathers.

Tropes used in Vurt include:

• Bittersweet Ending: Scribble brings Desdemona back into the real world, but must stay with Game Cat and become his apprentice and (as is hinted) his successor.]]
• Brother-Sister Incest: Scribble and Desdemona
• Deal with the Devil
• Eldritch Abomination: The Thing. Complete with unintelligible speech.
• Equivalent Exchange: When anything is taken from the Vurt, something of equal worth must be left behind. It's not entirely clear how this worth is determined, but sentimental value does count.
• Five Races: Along with five possible two-way hybrids, five three-way mixes, five four-way combinations, and one theoretical combination of all five races. This is genetically implausible, but so is the fact that human/dog is a viable pairing--just go with it.
• Great Big Book of Everything: The Game Cat
• Magical Land: Where Vurt takes you
• Meaningful Name: Scribble lives up to his name as he is the story teller.
• Mental Fusion: One time, Scribble can feel Suze inside his body, touching all his body parts.
• New Weird
• Shout-Out: Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden
  • Also, the name Curious Yellow is a reference to the film I Am Curious (Yellow), a foreign and soft erotic film.
• Telepathy: Bridget and other shadowgirls are capable of mind reading and writing.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Yellow feathers.