It’s too bad, in a way, that the novel requires Ugo himself to be remote or absent for long stretches, for he’s certainly Wilson’s wildest, most idiosyncratic character. But the mystery of Ugo’s vision is essential to the plot, in that upon the question of his basic sanity rest the chances of these various D-list hacks getting out of their jungle location alive.

The logistics of shooting in Colombia bring the film crew into contact with a very real underworld of violent Marxist revolutionaries and quietly sinister representatives of drug cartels. “There is no such thing as customs on the Amazon,” one young guerrilla tells another, “no such thing as government, no danger.” They could, he says, “train on grenade launchers and Uzis, never worry about being heard.” Wilson does all she can with these figures, and ultimately uses them to produce a gratifyingly artful climax; nevertheless, the revolutionaries in particular come off as somewhat stock — young, bumbling, sexually liberated yet done in by petty jealousies. Like the actors, they are playing roles, complete with fake names that must supersede their real ones; like the crew, they are urban creatures by nature, overmatched by the hostile new environment into which their hubris has driven them: “When she closes her eyes,” Wilson writes of one, “she can see nothing but the place they’re in, nothing but rot and rain and dead things left to soak, razor grasses and legions of invisible insects vibrating the air. . . . Their enemy, now, has no brain and a billion arms and can send spores rooting in wetlands of their bodies. They are all too weak.”

For decades, some film critics have sustained the ludicrous idea that “Cannibal Holocaust” — an Italian production in the wake of the Red Brigades and the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro — is actually a work of sophisticated social commentary, somehow about sensationalism instead of being merely sensational in itself. Deodato’s reply to one such interviewer — to his credit, as far as I am concerned — was that he just wanted to make a movie about cannibals. Similarly, while the publishers of “We Eat Our Own” appear to want to position it as (according to its jacket copy) “a thoughtful commentary on violence and its repercussions,” it is, thank God, no such thing: Wilson is concerned only with detail, with specificity and precision in the moment, and it’s that concern that marks her as a novelist of real substance and promise. Waiting nervously to be called to the set — still without a script, his requests for directorial guidance met only with hostility — the actor playing Richard ventures out one evening to what passes for a nightclub, really just a former storefront with its windows painted black: “You drink. They’re playing a song in English that you don’t recognize, projecting a black-and-white porno from the 1930s onto each of the three walls. . . . The guitars pluck, the rhythm too slow for dancing. Teenage girls dance anyway, in clusters, in front of men slouching in red chairs. The light from the projector turns their bodies white, then black, then marbled. . . . They have skinny chains looped around their abdomens, little shiny scars on their bellies, tiny girlish teeth. The dark crowds over them like a thunderhead and flees as they nudge each other into the beam of the projector.” That ­indoor-thunderhead image is a particular ­beauty. Wilson appears to have done a ton of research for this novel, but no amount of research can teach a writer to do that.

“Jungle Bloodbath” is eventually completed and controversially released; flash-forward transcripts from Ugo’s criminal ­trial serve as occasional ­entr’actes between chapters, and in them the unrepentant Ugo is at his volatile best, infantile and ­superior at the same time. His petulant refusal to answer questions directly, however self-serving, exposes the trial itself — its determination, in a world drenched in violent imagery, to distinguish the real from the unreal — as absurd. And when the fed-up prosecutor asks him directly how he can possibly justify the horrors he has put on the screen, at such terrible cost to his cast and crew, Ugo answers simply: “Did it scare you?” With that question, rhetorical and multitiered, he effectively rests his case.