[1] Cameron Smith is a high school slacker from Texas who is on “a slow but uncontrollable skid to nowhere”[2] living a somewhat aimless life.

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.

Dulcie has pink hair, wears boots, and spray paints her wings; she tells him that he can possibly save his life, but only by first finding Dr. X, a time traveling physicist.

Unconvinced at first by Dulcie's suggestion, Cameron changes his mind when he is attacked by fire giants and the mysterious Wizard of Reckoning — a masked figure wearing a silver space suit who is intent on killing him.

[3] Cameron sneaks out of the hospital with his roommate and high school classmate, Gonzo, a video game-playing boy with dwarfism who has an overprotective mother.

Throughout the next section of the story, “guided by random signs”,[4] Cameron and Gonzo take a bus to New Orleans, where Mardi Gras is happening.

Once they get to the Party House, Cameron and Gonzo find out that the three boys stole Balder in order to sell him on one of the station's game shows.

Once the three protagonists are reunited, they continue on to the beach for an afternoon on Balder's urging, humoring his explanation that his Norse ship is waiting for him once he gets to the shore to take him back to Valhalla.

He then wakes up in the hospital, to the scene of a nurse turning off his various life support machines and his parents and sister crying in the background and taking his hands, implying that the whole plot was a hallucination induced by the mad cow disease eating away at his brain.

In the final moments of the story, Dulcie literally takes Cameron in under her wings, and the setting is described as the sky explodes.

The book Going Bovine addresses themes including heroism, the definition of reality, the transformation from child to adult, and the influences of love and death on our lives.

Many influences can be seen from Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” in Bray's style of humor,[7] as well as Nick Hornby's “Slam.

[4] However, the majority of reviews were positive, including one critic calling it a “hilarious and hallucinatory quest” created out of a “hopeless situation.