Suzi Feay: I am sitting on a throne with a box on my head. I blame opium and Coleridge

Halfway down the corridor, the woman turned to face me, walking backwards, her glowing black eyes never leaving mine. She looked unnervingly like Miriam St Cyr doing her bonkers Claire Clairmont act in Ken Russell's Gothic. I tried to match my steps to hers in the gloom, clumsily imitating her snakecharmer's glide.

At the end of the vaulted brick passage she paused and, standing slightly too close, fiddled with my headset. "You will see visions – they won't touch you. Walk slowly," she murmured. "Don't be afraid." (I'm only afraid of you, Missy.) Then she pulled back a curtain and waved me into a black antechamber containing a throne. "Sit down," a voice intoned.

I went to the Camden Roundhouse to experience Euphor!um, a voyage into the opium reveries that inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write "Kubla Khan". But I'm afraid as soon as Morpheus appeared in the gloom and put a box over my head, I lost it completely, stumbling around, brushing my hand on the sharp brickwork and bashing my head on the wall. The network of narrow corridors and high arches, now dimly visible through the box, reminded me of the undercroft of a Roman amphitheatre: a Piranesian image of terror. I'm absurdly suggestible. Weird shapes bobbed and revolved before me, and if I hadn't been in such a panic, I'd have noted more clearly that the effects were straight from the eggbox-and-tinfoil school of theatre design: Kenneth Anger guest-directs Playschool. You're supposed to take half an hour on this magical trip; I blundered through in 15 minutes, the soundtrack hiccuping and blipping as it struggled to keep up with me. Though I certainly felt a touch of "holy dread", I hadn't fed on honey-dew or drunk the milk of paradise.

But where was the famous Person from Porlock? Why were there no priceless bits of dialogue like the ones in the Julian Temple film Pandaemonium, which also took "Kubla Khan" as its sacred text. Coleridge: "This is my new friend, Wordsworth. We're going to work together on a book that will change the face of poetry utterly and make us famous for all time." Sara Coleridge: "Will he be wanting tea, then?"

Latex lovers

Honey-dew is in decidedly short supply in the literary world these days. There may be big novels on the horizon, but I'm not allowed to talk about them. I've just received a copy of the new Donna Tartt (signed, limited edition, thanks very much Bloomsbury), but I've had to sign an embargo letter which amounts to the famous scene in This is Spinal Tap where the rockumentary film maker is exhorted not to point – or even look – at Nigel Tufnell's favourite guitar. At first glance, The Little Friend is about the devastation wreaked on a Southern family when a young boy dies mysteriously. There's lots of Southern cookin' and locutions like "I done called him", as well as Tartt's trademark stately prose. "Under no circumstances shall any of the material from the Book ... appear in The Independent on Sunday ... in any form whatsoever at any time prior to 26 October." Ooops.

We can't discuss that, so here's a DVD box showing a pouting, depilated lovely and promising Seven Rides for Seven Brothers. What's this all about? "From the writer of Acid Arse and Muffspotting" – ah, that'll be the invitation to Irvine Welsh's launch party, then. In his new novel, Porno, Sick Boy and Renton from Trainspotting team up to make the porn film of that title. The cover features one of those blow-up sex-dolls so beloved of art directors, film-makers and comedy scriptwriters that in hundreds of years' time, earnest academics will, Sex BC-like, assume that every household had several.

Then there's the book Shit Magnet, which hit my desk a few days ago – and the bin two seconds later, where all "humour" titles get filed. A picture of a blow-up doll would have been too classy for this jacket designer: instead it shows the author gurning maniacally with a curly turd hovering over his head. This book featured a jacket quote from Screw magazine, to the effect that as the author is too transgressive for "pansy-ass publishers" he's been forced to publish himself: a more colourfully expressed version of the boast of many who go down the vanity route. Transgression, what sex-crimes are committed in thy name. Here's a lovingly drawn comic book showing a Ziggy Stardust throwback expressing his true sexual nature by shagging the corpses of women who've been ripped from throat to vagina. With a reassuring photograph on the back of the author in scary drag.

But even that doesn't win "Most Frightening Author Photo". On the cover of Sex Terror: Erotic Misadventures in Pop Culture, the writer scowls with chainsaw, dungarees and mask, à la Eminem – but that pudgy little pansy-ass rapper would take one look at those biceps and burst into tears. The coverline runs: "This book will change the way you think about sex. It may even put you off it altogether." Ah, yes, it's the IoS's very own Mark Simpson with his latest collection of interviews and columns.

Be that as it may, in the interests of fairness, I still put Sex Terror through what I call the Random Sentence Test (if you're a sensitive author, look away now). What you do is open a book anywhere and read the first sentence your eye falls on. You can repeat the exercise as many times as you like, but three goes is normally sufficient. The test – which I often use to determine whether books should be reviewed or not – is simple but devastating. I violently took against Decca Aitkenhead's Travels in Search of the Perfect E just because I opened it and read the words: "The evening took its predictable course." That sentence wouldn't be acceptable even in the memoirs of a Tupperware seller, let alone a joyous exploration of rave culture.

But open Simpson's book at any point, as many times as you want, and you'll find the sort of gem-like sentences that Zadie Smith would give her white teeth for. "[Schadenfreude] isn't enough to innoculate you against the kind of boredom that will make your genitals pack their bags and leave home, slamming the door so hard on their way out that your nipples drop off," is his magnificent dismissal of My Gender Workbook. The random sentence test doesn't work, because you just keep on reading. He grills an uncharacteristically meek Julie Burchill ("I don't know, Mark, you tell me"), a touchy porn star, and, hilariously, the hyperbutch Henry Rollins, who wants to scotch the idea that he's gay.

Unfortunately this magnificent book (once you've brown-papered the jacket) is only published in America (Harrington Park Press). Simpson doesn't have much luck with his UK publishers, but then it took Coleridge 19 years to get "Kubla Khan" into print. In the future, when scholars are wondering why 21st-century Britons were so obsessed with blow-up dolls, no doubt we'll all be blundering round disused tramsheds with boxes on our heads, experiencing SimpyWorld.