Going Bovine

Going Bovine is a 2009 surreal dark comedy novel by Libba Bray. It follows the experiences of high school junior Cameron Smith as he suffers from transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.

Plot summary

Cameron Smith is a high school slacker from Texas who is on “a slow but uncontrollable skid to nowhere” living a somewhat aimless life. His father is a college physics professor; his mother is a community college English teacher. Cameron’s apparent social exclusion is emphasized when the author introduces his sister, Jenna, who is described as perfect. One of the first scenes in the novel is of Cam having what he thinks is a marijuana-induced hallucination of flames during his English class. This public hallucination gets Cameron sent to multiple drug counselors, all while his hallucinations continue. Cameron’s life starts to spiral out of control when he is diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob variant BSE (also known as mad cow disease), possibly contracted from the cafeteria at his school or his minimum-wage job at the fast food joint Buddha Burger.