With last year’s genre-bending collection “The Wilds,” Julia Elliott introduced herself as a Flannery O’Connor for the data-mining age: a dark poet of the grotesque and absurd in a world that feels ever more science fictional. “The New and Improved Romie Futch,” her first novel, follows in the same hoof prints, weaving a Southern Gothic fable out of near-future neuroscience and Frankenfood beasts.

The taxidermist Romie Futch is your typical Southern loser. A recently divorced “40-ish animal stuffer, balding and childless, though pregnant with a beer belly,” Romie sits around moaning about his ex-wife, Helen, and debating the merits of heavy metal bands with his drunken pals. When the cannabis and booze can’t dull his heartache, Romie decides to take part in experimental trials for “pedagogical downloads via direct brain-computer interface.” In short: Scientists zap books into his brain. Gray matter overloaded with Foucault, Bernhard and Judith Butler, Romie struggles under the torrent of knowledge. As a fellow patient says, “Can’t think without some Latinate polysyllable, or, uh, I mean, some bone-jacked Chaucerism jumping my dome.”

The schlub who becomes a somebody — through magic, luck or digital downloads — is an old tale, and Elliott’s premise initially sounds like “Flowers for Algernon” as imagined by George Saunders. But the book quickly forges its own path as we realize that Romie’s ambitions are not the stuff of fame or fortune. Hyped on postmodern aesthetic theory, Romie wants to turn his taxidermy business into a studio for bizarre art using mutated animals that have been spotted around the area. Secretly, he hopes this will win back Helen. While sculpturing three-legged birds and albino frogs, and battling post-brain-­tinkering migraines and blackouts, Romie hears rumors of Hogzilla, a possibly bioengineered monster pig terrorizing the Southern woods. Soon he’s sailing the digital waves of Google searches and message boards for info on his porcine Moby Dick. The hunt is on.