John Niven on his new book Kill 'Em All

John Niven's Kill ‘Em All is a book full of rich and powerful people trying to get richer and more powerful. The cast are from the very top of the entertainment industry, thriving in a world of Trump and Brexit; the props are from the Financial Times' ‘How to Spend It’ supplement and the narrative lives on disinformation, blatant lies and the timeless truth that money can buy you anything. "You fuck someone over," ruminates our protagonist Steven Stelfox, sitting in the only half-decent restaurant in Vegas, "you wreck a life, you order the fifty-six-dollar portion of black cod and you move onto the next thing."

This is not the first time we’ve met Stelfox. Kill Your Friends, published in 2008, was John Niven’s breakout success – a wild and deeply shocking send-up of the music industry at its height in 1997. In it, Stelfox is a 27-year-old A&R man trying to sign the next big hit, while taking a lot of coke in the process. Kill ‘Em All picks up 20 years later: he’s made a huge fortune from a TV talent show, and spends his semi-retirement renting yachts and sleeping with women – or ‘boilers’ – half his age.

There’s a crisis, though. Lucius Du Pre, the world’s most famous pop star, is also a drug-addled paedophile. He’s deeply in debt (running Narnia, his amusement park home, costs millions of dollars alone) and the only way to make the money back is to go on a global comeback tour – which he’s in no fit state to do. When the parents of one of Du Pre’s ‘special friends’ start blackmailing him, Stelfox gets called in to sort out this mess.

Why, after ten years, has Niven returned to Stelfox, this outrageous monster? "For two reasons," he says. "The first is literary. I like authors who use the same character every so often, the best example being John Updike." The second is that Stelfox is the perfect character through which to understand the events of recent years. "There’s a really boring novel to be written about Brexit and Trump - but Stelfox is loving the disruption and chaos and the opportunities to make money that it presents."

Reading it feels a bit like being trolled; perhaps that’s the fate of satire in the 21st century. Stelfox is deeply cynical, motivated solely by the accumulation and display of wealth. He’s racist and misogynist in the way that only extremely rich and powerful white men can be and his success has depended on him being a total arsehole. His one redeeming feature is that he’s surrounded by people who are even worse than he is: the megastar paedophile and the team of fixers who enable him. The novel’s title gets increasingly urgent as we get to know these people; it becomes a question of when and how Stelfox is going to get rid of the fuckers.

The usual rules of justice and truth don’t apply: no one gets locked up and Stelfox gets away with all kinds of dodgy deals and insider trading. It’s frustrating – but true to life, says Niven. "I wanted it to be true to that world, where the absolute monsters are running everything. The nice guys end up releasing records on indie labels from their granny’s spare room. We live in a time right now where we’re beyond all responsibility. I used to feel like there would come a reckoning with this. But we’re beyond accountability, and people slime their way out of anything."

This is how the world works now: powerful people do and say awful things, then their PRs sit in a room and invent the narrative, which gets fed straight into the bloodstream of the masses. "There have always been lots of very thick people out there," says Niven, "but it’s never been so easy to deliver information to them." And the truth no longer has any power, even when we know we’re being sold what is, in Niven’s words, "obviously mad cobblers". You don’t need to tell the truth, just keep repeating the crap: "Here’s my lie, prove me wrong."

So is there a way out of all this? "I don’t know," says Niven, "I never thought that a lunatic like Trump could be in the White House and I can’t see how it ends. Right now you can’t really be in the business of predicting what’s going to happen next." In a world where consequences, accountability and responsibility are unnecessary, things don’t go the way they should. We all know that money is evil, says Niven, but it still swills about and runs everything. His latest book brings us eye to eye with the men who fuck everyone over, make a shit ton of money, and then hunt around for the right kind of tits and ass to spend it on. Maybe we should just kill them all.

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John Niven's book tour for Kill 'Em All starts on September 27 at Mono in Glasgow, 28 at Blackwell's in Edinburgh with Neu Reekie!, and 29 at Waterstones Inverness, before continuing around the UK.