'We're talking Nostalgia Trap?'
'You got it. And the room where Beetle sleeps? With the straps and whips?'
'That's got to be Mistress Pervurt. I've done all these!'
'Look closely.'
And then I started to get it, the feeling of being cheated. I looked closely at the Catholic Fuck room. The blood didn't look that real any more. I smeared some on to my fingers, sniffed at it.
'This is paint?'
Lucinda laughed. 'Barnie had these rooms designed for me. They're copies of best-selling feathers. It's fun isn't it? And Barnie gets off on it, I think.'
'He can't do Vurt?'
'You got it. Barnie is flightless.'

Vurt (the thing, not the book) is a drug, but a corporately or government-produced drug like Hollywood movies and yet it's physical -- each Vurt is a colored feather you have to suck to get the trip (blues are basic, pinks are pornos, and yellows are dangerous because they tell you things about reality) and maybe it's such a trip that you really go there.

Each Vurt has a name. There's Pleasureville and Thermo Fish and Skull Shit (that's a black -- blacks are very negative, misery trip for people who get off on stuff like that). The Game Cat says it better:

It has been calculated, by the calculators, that one night can hold SIX DREAMS only. There is a colour for each, a feather for each. BLUE is the colour of safe desires, legal dreaming. BLACK is the colour of bootleg Vurt, feathers of tenderness and pain, one sliver beyond the law. PINK is the colour of Pornovurts, doorways to bliss. CREAM is the colour of a used-up feather, one that has been drained of dreams. Only blue black and pink feathers go cream. The makers build this property into the flights, just to make sure you come back for more. You only get one trip per journey. SILVER is the colour of the operators; those who work the feathers - making them, filming them, doing the remixes, opening doors. They are the toolkit feathers, and the Game Cat has a collection worth dying for. YELLOW is the colour of death, and should be avoided at all costs. They are not for the weak. Yellows have no jerkout facilities. Be careful. Be very, very careful. If you die in a yellow dream, you die in real life. The only way out is to finish the game.

Right. So, Vurt is a collective dream maybe or some parallel universe, and things can move between the two, but only when they are swapped. And you can only swap things of equal worth. Scribble's sister, Des, got stuck in a yellow and swapped for the Thing. Scribb wants her back so he's hanging on to the thing, but you can't always get a Yellow, especially Curious Yellow -- that's only found in English Voodoo.

There's some mad capers dodging cops and dog people -- and so much grossness -- as the Stash Riders try to get Scribble his English Voodoo feather, leading to many artful observations, such as:

Listen carefully. This is the secret of how to live: fire your gun before somebody else does.

Those who come by this wisdom, have frequently paid a painful price.

I was screaming, and it wasn't very dignified.
Well, listen: fuck dignity. Fuck dignity to death.

There's a lot of messed up things in this story. I think they would have been off-putting if the world of Vurt wasn't so goofy. It's so outlandish it probably shouldn't have worked and could have ended up as a silly absurdity with no point. But Noon walks the line and keeps it just coherent enough that it works. I still don't know if there was a point, but the ride sure was fun and full of things like this:

Some bad things you've got to do, just to speed up the life, in the face of death.

Vurt is pure punkness extruded out of some slimy steel sewer pipe that people forgot existed beneath Manchester. The world is a broken city. Everybody is on drugs. All edges are hard. and cops are always the enemy, especially this one cop, this bad bitch Murdoch.

Where do you run, when the bad girl comes? Maybe you run home to Mummy. Maybe you run towards your lover. Or maybe, like me, you've got a Beetle in your life; somebody powerful, even if he was just this moment thick-bodied from the overuse of cheap Tapewormer feathers.

Some people have a Beetle in their lives and don't need stories, but for those of us who don't, you can read Vurt and try to get along.