Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me

by Malcolm Mc Neill

Observed While Falling is the account of Malcolm Mc Neill’s1970s collaboration with writer William S. Burroughs on the Word/Image novel Ah Pook is Here — a project that considered the Mayan and contemporary perceptions of Death and Time and the ways they are used to create systems of social Control. The book was never finished, but the significant amount of work produced was unaccountably lost to the record for thirty years, until an unlikely sequence of events brought it back to light. In 2003, Mc Neill discovered another English artist whose own Word/Image collaboration with an American writer during the 1840s, also concerning the Maya, confirmed many of the ideas within Ah Pook is Here. The way in which the artist revealed himself however, and the uncannily similar histories of two individuals living centuries apart, compelled Mc Neill to write Observed While Falling and in the process, improbably, yet indisputably, realize Ah Pook's fictional premise as fact. The result is a series of insights into the nature of words and images, fact and fiction and Death and Time that are unprecedented in any creative context.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication November 10, 2026