Mo-Leeza Robert's novel Head describes the desperate future that clusters around Head Gallery like cockroaches swarming over a pig's head. It is at once critical and complicit, deluded and envious. Jerry-rigging saccharine sci-fi, with a leavened mush of curatorial artspeak, artists, collectors, hanger-ons and other art world actors explode in ecstasy, pain, or self-induced eradication – all, according to the whims of the Head Gallery, which remains an anonymous and inviolate force, the overseer of events and a selfless accumulator of prestige and wealth. Familiar contemporary artists are reanimated for the future, giving the events described an unsettling familiarity. Any reader familiar with the art world should feel both seduced, and infected. It is like Dickens but with laughs induced by our approaching extinction, and like Salò, written, directed and starred in by Barbara Gladstone.