At one point in Nathaniel G. Moore’s debut novel, the narrator, Charles Haas, speculates about how his existence might be described if it were a work of fiction. The passage that follows is a parody of pulp horror, in which the protagonist is paralyzed with fear, able to do little more than “taste his brain eating the sweat in his hair.” The evocative image and hyper self-consciousness are characteristic of Wrong Bar’s prose. Its narrator, after all, is a writer who becomes an ill-fated inhabitant of one of his own fictive worlds.

This metafictional conceit is not an end in itself, but rather a fisheye lens through which to view the world of millennial, text-messaged teenage decadence. When he pens and performs a voice-over for an art video, Haas gets mixed up with a group of teens. He becomes both a fly on the wall and a participant in their sexually charged social circle. The association ends badly for both Haas and the teens, whose instant messages culminate in a fatal hoax.

Much like the teens – who both fascinate and repulse him – Haas is imaginative, unbalanced, and unreliable. His tendency to blur the fictive and factual is one of the many challenges the novel poses. Wrong Bar’s idiosyncratic prose is distractingly fraught with metaphor, and the narrative is fragmentary, a pastiche of first-person narration, news clippings, online messages, film scripts, transcripts, and the odd illustration.

Despite his romantic entanglements with teenage art video extras, at 29 years of age, Haas is decidedly removed from millennial adolescent culture. The novel sets out to say something about this culture but never quite succeeds, perhaps because the narrator ends up getting in the way.

In publicity materials for the book, Moore describes Wrong Bar as Brighton Rock for the Twitter age. The novel’s dense symbolic order, paranoiac overtones, and ominous acronyms also make significant nods to The Crying of Lot 49. Wrong Bar demands the same attentiveness as Pynchon’s postmodern classic, but does not deliver the same rewards.