The Moon is Gay by Phil Rot (2025, Fun and Games)

Man Is A Machine, Living In A Dream

After publishing the most important novel in history in the form of The Raft at the start of last year, Phil Rot has once again returned with a title that won’t be beaten for the rest of the year, The Moon Is Gay.

It’s almost as though he knows that by releasing his books in January, he essentially breaks the rest of the year for everyone else; he is claiming 2026 as the property of Phil Rot Industries™, just as he did in 2025.

It’s the literary equivalent of a dog urinating on a streetlight to claim it as its own territory. This is Phil Rot’s game, and we are just disgusting pawns in it, pawns that are in very real danger of being inserted into someone’s (or something’s) rectum.

Let’s get our lazy comparisons out of the way: the footnotes of David Foster Wallace, the humour of early South Park, the worldbuilding of Warhammer 40k and a cast of characters that Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear Solid, might come up with if he smoked crack cocaine.

The book is so funny; the use of language is just as inventive and brilliant as it is in The Raft, whether it’s the narrator, Phil Rot himself, who delightfully recounts this epic tale to the reader in the manner of an English gentleman from a Chili’s Bar & Grill (when he isn’t sexually propositioning them, that is), or the phantasmagoric body horror of a pregnant streamer shitting out a baby “cutie” reptile, the “cutie” is not the pregnancy, by the way; she ingested the “cutie” eggs separately, come on, keep up!

Without giving too much away, the book is essentially about gay werewolves who live on the moon, and the aforementioned pregnant streamer whose penis-shaped rocket is now stranded there. It’s essentially a completely insane version of the 1986 sci-fi movie Aliens, with gay werewolves in the place of the Xenomorph and camgirls in the place of the colonists. If that doesn’t sell this book to you, then yeah, you’re a long way from home, Dorothy.

This time around we’re also blessed with illustrations by the excellent Hunter Vibin, which, along with the footnotes and Chilli’s Bar & Grill interludes, really improve the whole reader experience. The Raft was sold as a “micro-novel,” but it’s fantastic that we now have a fully fleshed-out Phil Rot novel, with even more absurdist maximalism to get our teeth into.

The parts with mock Dungeons & Dragons stat boosts actually made me think there’s potential for a board game, a video game, or maybe even an AI-generated cartoon set in the Phil Rot universe. One of my dream collaborations would now be Phil Rot and Alfred Alfer, the creator of The Will Stancil Show on X.

Humour and satire have for years been considered a secondary form of media, even though they do the one thing many modern “gritty” forms of media don’t: they lift us up and let us laugh at the world and ourselves.

In the interview following Sam Hyde’s “Ted Talk” stunt, when someone asks what his talk was all about, he self-deprecatingly says, “I dunno, it was just a bunch of horse shit.” But the truth is, it wasn’t; it was a series of well-written absurdist comedy jokes, many of which have entered the modern lexicon, with some even turning out to be alarmingly prescient.

Everything in The Moon Is Gay is so incredibly “by design” that Phil Rot, too, should be celebrated as one such master of comedy and satire.

I don’t believe we’ll see any resurgence of vital male authors. We might get a Tao Lin here, a Jordan Castro there, but nothing that will truly shake anything up. I don’t think we’ll get another Diary of an Oxygen Thief, either; the door to the castle of Big Lit is closed to almost all of us, and the occupants of said castle have barricaded themselves in.

The point I am making is that Phil Rot is possibly the pinnacle example of the value of self-publishing platforms. The thought that this book would be shared only among friends and sat on a computer, rather than available to all of us in physical form, is nothing short of horrifying, a fact I mused upon in between chapters.

We don’t get cartoons like Ren and Stimpy or Beavis and Butthead anymore, or music like Anal Cunt and GG Allin; instead, we (luckily) get writers like Phil Rot.

Phil Rot is the last remaining bastion of what we retroactively call “Low Brow Culture,” which was a perfectly accepted form of media up to the early 2000s, when humour suddenly became illegal overnight.

As well as filling the void left by the disappearance of that form of media, he also nods to another lost form of Culture: sci-fi and fantasy pulp fiction, which, in the hands of genre masters such as Lovecraft, Bradbury, and Howard, of course isn’t “Low Brow Culture” at all, and still exists in the shadows today, just as it did largely in its heyday, when people looked down their noses at it.

The people who are creating culture that directly opposes the media machine designed to grind us into dust are the most important cultural custodians in history.

Phil Rot is refusing to die on his knees; he is standing and screaming at the entire establishment, and you should care about that fact. He’s also a seriously good writer, and stupidly funny to boot.

Buy The Moon is Gay from The United States of Amazon, here. Or go to Hell.