The novel is the story of Raymond Gunt, an offensive and shocking narrator, and his journey from London through Los Angeles to Kiribati, an island in the Pacific Ocean, where he is to work on a reality television show.

In an interview with NPR, Coupland stated that the novel was written as an antidote to an "epidemic of earnestness", and that the book was motivated by the question, "Why not just go against a trend and write something that might damage a person's soul if they read it?

Raymond and Neal arrive in Kiribati to begin filming the reality TV series, while the world around them has degraded into a state of turmoil, which may or may not be their fault.

The Scotsman described Worst as "profoundly bleak",[3] while the Washington Post called it "scabrously hilarious" and "an erupting Vesuvius of abuse and profanity".

Club stated that it was "essentially an extended shaggy-dog story",[5] and the Financial Times said that the "plot is a cavalcade of more or less random events", but emphasized that it "succeeds by its verbal energy, the brio of its invention, the snappiness with which successive gags and ever more appalling atrocities are piled on.