H igh Life, British writer Matthew Stokoe’s second novel, may be the hardest-to-stomach work of narrative fiction ever created. I know of nothing to compare it to except Stokoe’s first novel, Cows, which is fully its own conversation. If you’ve never read him, you’re either missing out or doing yourself a favor.

The intestine-tightening disgustingness of Stokoe’s work is not everything—he’s an immensely compassionate and thoughtful writer—but no discussion of what he does can overlook this aspect. A cursory inventory of scenes in High Life should suffice: there’s the jackhammer-snuff scene, the anal-crowbar scene, the speculum-pissing scene, the mouth-shitting and genital-vomiting scenes, the kidney-removal-and-masturbation scene, the corpse-double-teaming scene, the dog-evisceration scene, and a thousand varieties of incest, morgue malfeasance, and homemade porn featuring both voluntary and involuntary actors.

Our protagonist, Hollywood hanger-on Jack, roams like a doomed and venal Orpheus through the Los Angeles underworld in which these ungodly acts play out, nominally in search of his wife’s murderer. When he first sets out, there’s not much to him beyond stagnant celebrity worship and a desperation to flee the dreary life in which he’s ended up. As he puts it, “What I wanted from her death was a reason to move in a world where the usual social obediences didn’t apply”—in other words, to descend into hell on earth and find out what going down there calls up in him.

All noir is about exploration, driven by a fundamental if jaded interest in the world, but most noir skews toward mystery, taking up the search for a specific truth: solving a crime, uncovering a disguised identity, retrieving stolen money. This assumes a darkness that can ebb and flow, concealing clues that can be drawn into the light by a detective who plunges in expecting to climb back out. High Life has a very different take on noir, one arguably closer to horror or to the morbid rant: it’s not about dispelling darkness; it’s about establishing that life itself is darkness. This is the general truth that blots out all specific ones.

In this sense, “true noir”—as Ken Bruen calls High Life on the cover of the 2002 edition—is pointless. It’s a genre in which descent is the only path, followed only for its own sake, with no surprises at the end. But it’s also honest: it’s a genre in which the detective has...