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