Eraserhead Press, 90 pages, paperback, $9.52

“I got misty-eyed at the sight of the last acidophilus bacterium floating around lifeless in the toilet water. Then I decided to crap into my hand anyway and wait for the guard to come for the breakfast bowl. That small pleasure was keeping me sane and there was no reason to stop. As chance would have it, I never got to throw that last steaming turd at the pointy head of my molluscoid nemesis.”

Somewhere between Arthur Rimbaud’s painful teen spirit poetry, Philip K. Dick’s nasty portrait of an unnamed future, and the general horror of our own psyche, a literary genre lies in wait, awaiting an unsuspecting readership. Without making too big a deal out of a protagonist with a mouth on his stomach named Philippe who eats purple porridge (at one point he tells the stomach, “Shut up, you fucking aberration. You’re the reason we’re here in the first place”), Iglesias comically lets readers into a fully foul and breathing underworld of petty criminals, rumors of bull sharks with guns mounted on their heads as a potential bait for tourism, monstrous lovers, and punitive systems set up for disobedient consumers.

Gutmouth, Gabino Iglesias’s debut novella, is full of star-crossed body deformities, such as a one-legged stripper and cyber-prostitute he calls a “gimpy slut,” and takes place in a world where daily mutations are as common as traffic lights. So, with the context set for stun and trauma, I continued reading.

“At the club there was a group of nervous, sweaty men waiting in line outside because some tub or lard had suffered a heart attack inside. Workers were chopping him up to remove all eight hundred pounds from the cyber-encounter lounge.”

With elements of classic horror and noir spliced into Gutmouth, Iglesias’s voice and pace and ability to push the narrative along without getting bogged down or entertained by his own sense of abject itinerary is its greatest strength.

Nothing is peaceful or serene or really redemptive about this world in which they all live and befoul every quadrant of space, but to create such illusions isn’t really the author’s goal. This is a portrait of a world we hopefully never have to live in, and Iglesias’s characters do plenty of suffering — perhaps so we don’t have to.

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Nathaniel G. Moore is a Toronto novelist. He just released Savage 1986-2011 with Anvil Press about a horrible family in Toronto who make “Married With Children” look like “The Cosby Show.” Visit his site at SavageANovel.tumblr.com.