It’s commonplace in this kind of article to tell you we’re reading the book so you don’t have to. It’s a tease, usually. In the case of List of the Lost, however, it’s absolutely true. Do not read this book; do not sully yourself with it, no matter how temptingly brief it seems. All those who shepherded it to print should hang their heads in shame, for it’s hard to imagine anything this bad has been put between covers by anyone other than a vanity publisher. It is an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey’s imagination.

The singer himself has described it thus: “The theme is demonology … the left-handed path of black magic. It is about a sports relay team in 1970s America who accidentally kill a wretch who, in esoteric language, might be known as a Fetch … a discarnate entity in physical form. He appears, though, as an omen of the immediate deaths of each member of the relay team. He is a life force of a devil incarnate, yet in his astral shell he is one phase removed from life. The wretch begins a banishing ritual of the four main characters, and therefore his own death at the beginning of the book is illusory.”

Not that you need to know that, really. All you need to know is not to buy it. Please don’t encourage Morrissey to write any more novels. While Autobiography was fascinating, at times beautiful, and with enough charm to balance out the bitterness, List of the Lost offers nothing but the astonishing feat, in a book so brief, of being boring.

But what can we learn from it?

Morrissey’s ego remains untrammelled

That, surely, is the only reason for the publication of List of the Lost in this form. It appears to be unedited, the curse of the writer whose commercial clout is stronger than their publisher’s willpower. It’s not just the typos and grammatical errors – of which there are plenty – but the endless digressions, the inability to come to any sort of a point. There might be a tolerable 20-page short story nestling in here somewhere (there probably isn’t, but let’s be generous for a moment), but no editor has been allowed to search for it. The ego that demanded Autobiography be published as an instant Penguin Classic has this one published in a jacket redolent of the great Penguin editions of the 1960s. This book is not fit to share a bookshop with them, let alone a bookshelf.

Morrissey is still hugely hung up about sex

We learned in Autobiography that Morrissey has had partners. We learn from List of the Lost that his attitudes towards sex remains odd: it is associated with death, for one thing. It seems to be predatory: older men feed upon the young. Which makes it all the odder that Morrissey writes about his track team in such a fetishising way. “Imperishable, they train insatiably, companions in pleasure and passionate in sentiments, they are the living picture of the desired physique.” (Ask yourself if a 56-year-old man writing in that manner about women in their teens or early 20s would be considered anything other than a bit creepy.) When he comes to describe sex itself, it’s even worse. “Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”

Morrissey can’t write dialogue

Every character in List of the Lost speaks like a parody of Morrissey at his most florid and self-indulgent: bad puns, hopeless “quickfire” dialogue, and desperate self-pity: “I suffer greatly in painful silence and I speak to you, now, with servitude whilst also pleading for your understanding. I am alone and I agonize in an exasperated state.” That, one strongly suspects, was not a common pattern of speech in Boston in 1975. That line one might defend by saying it comes from what might very well be an apparition, yet the apparition speaks much as the flesh-and-blood characters do – you could not tell the characters apart from their speech – and in the next paragraph goes into a remarkable matter-of-fact description of where to find the body of her murdered child, “all neatly blanketed by a durable covering of weather-soaked layers of sheet metal”. Durable covering, you say? Hmmm. What sealant did the murderer use? Not something weather-resistant, evidently …

List of the Lost … A novel not to treasure. Photograph: Penguin

Morrissey still has scores to settle (part one)

Character upon character reminds us that justice and law are different things, and that the legal system is not to be trusted. That judge who branded Morrissey “devious, truculent and unreliable” and who failed to find in his favour when the Smiths’ rhythm section sought more money has not been forgiven. Even the “Fetch” Morrissey has referred to – a homeless man the four relay runners encounter in some woods – manages to get his dig at judges in before being unceremoniously killed. “Judges don’t live in the ghetto … they are exclusively verbal beings. What can they understand about the way life moves? … Would judges even recognize dog shit if they saw it? … Judges have to live in secrecy, don’t they, because they’ve done so much harm to society.” One half expects the character, with his dying breath, to sigh: “And Joyce and Rourke never deserved a penny!” Bafflingly, this American demon, in an American wood, speaking to American people, also wants to let them know that royalty is a meaningless concept. It’s possible, living in a republic, that they already knew that.

Morrissey still has scores to settle (part two)

Remember those belligerent ghouls who ran Manchester schools? Turns out they’re running Boston colleges as well. Only this time they’re doing worse than grabbing and devouring, and kicking while you’re showering. In fact, this one prefers to sodomise with “hatred and bloodlust and bigotry”. But let’s not ruin it for the poor souls who plan to read List of the Lost.

Morrissey still has scores to settle (part three)

Damn you, meat eaters. You might think there would be no particular reason for a lecture about the slaughter of animals in a book about athletes being stalked by a malevolent force. You would, of course, be wrong. “At the human hand the animals are whacked and hacked into chopped meat whilst gazing up at their protector with disbelief and pleading for a mercy not familiar to the human spirit, ground and round into hash or stew for the Big Mac pleasure of fat-podge children.”

Morrissey still has scores to settle (part four)

And his greatest grievance is with Britain itself. A whole section, inexplicably, is devoted to Morrissey’s disgust at the conduct of British establishment during the second world war (along with a contemptuous repetition of the rumour that Winston Churchill and Ivor Novello were lovers, which is odd, given that he also complains that Churchill being credited with winning the war stole the credit from Alan Turing, denied glory because he was gay). Rare is the writer who is willing to complain that the big problem with Churchill during the war was that he was, frankly, a bit of a coward and unwilling to try to identify with the people he governed, but Morrissey is that writer. “Churchill himself would experience World War 2 safely and in a suite of rooms at Claridge’s most luxurious Mayfair hotel, with not a complicated twitch or pang to trouble his elaborate evening meal.” We’ll leave aside the fact that he makes it sound like Claridge’s is a chain, with the Mayfair branch simply its most upscale outpost – “Yeah, I was going to go stop at the Travelodge, but I got a deal on the Claridge’s at Peterborough services” – and instead note that the entire passage reads like a polemic written by a particularly single-minded street corner pamphleteer (see also Morrissey’s writing about the pernicious power of, wait for it, local television news. Damn you, Look North, with your hegemony!).

Morrissey does not favour the light touch

The most prominent character in List of the Lost is Ezra. He is the one who loves and is loved, the one who seeks justice for the wronged, the unofficial leader of the gang. Yet he’s also the one who commits the crime that sets the tragedies in motion. Ezra’s surname is Pound. Ezra Pound, of course, was the poet and defender of his contemporaries who went on to become a fascist, and broadcast propaganda against his native United States from Italy during the second world war. Think about it, yeah?

Morrissey may not be the world’s leading expert on sport

One of the more surprising revelations of Autobiography was that Morrissey had been a talented runner, so it’s perhaps not surprising that a relay team is at the centre of the narrative. What’s more surprising is that they are a half-mile relay team. Now, I am willing to be corrected on this, but I’ve looked around and can see no evidence of such an event existing. There are two rarely contested relays that might fit the bill – the 4x200m and the 4x800m – but they appear to be so rarely contested that it seems hugely unlikely a college would have a specialist team in either, or that such an event would be part of a televised college athletics meeting. Frankly, though, that’s the least of List of the Lost’s problems