Travelogue, film criticism and autobiography are among the genres fused in this surreal narrative, in which a neurotic Self-alike tries to shake off his obsessive-compulsive disorder by taking a trip to Los Angeles to find out who or what "killed film" (the suspects include Sony, CGI and Mike Myers). After resuming a rivalrous childhood friendship with a 3ft-tall sculptor, he brawls with Daniel Craig's stunt double, mutates into the Incredible Hulk, and wakes to find that he's developed the breasts of the Mulholland Drive star Laura Harring.

Essayistic interludes punctuate the action: there's a bracing take on the Polanski affair, and many funny riffs about the effortful artifice film-making involves. When the narrator learns that air traffic controllers were flown to Pinewood Studios "to play the parts of the air traffic controllers" in the film United 93, he can't help thinking of the "air traffic controllers who had ensured those air traffic controllers landed safely, so that they could pretend to be witnessing the feigned destruction of real bodies".

Jollity and gloom collide: the darker material, which draws on the author's history of drug addiction and the death of his mother, brings to mind Bret Easton Ellis's eerie memoir-thriller Lunar Park, a novel that Self is shown reading. Ellis himself pops up, along with several other writers who have come to LA to beg for work, including a tramp who turns out to be Salman Rushdie. A drolly emphatic disclaimer warns against mistaking these names for their real-life counterparts  which is probably just as well, given what Self writes about Toni Morrison.

Extravagant prose is inevitably a stand-out feature of the book. The first vowel of the word "descended" appears 523 times in order to evoke Norman Bates's super-slo-mo knife attack in Douglas Gordon's art installation 24-Hour Psycho. Although Self's alter-ego frets about the "arrant nonsense" of his style, there's plenty to enjoy here, especially the 26-word compound adjective with which he memorably vents spleen at a gabby jet passenger.

The fear of early-onset dementia haunts Self's return to London, and he promptly embarks on a walking tour of the fast-eroding Yorkshire coast. At one point, he asks a local for directions to the next village. "Ahv no ahdëah", comes the reply. Some readers may feel the same way about this bizarro hotchpotch  but if you're prepared to accept its eccentricity, much fun awaits.