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The Red Night Trilogy #2
The Place of Dead Roads
A controversial reworking of well-trodden American myth by the author of ‘Naked Lunch’.
This surreal fable, set in America’s Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America.
Fantastical and humorous, ‘The Place of Dead Roads’ continues William Burroughs’ exploration of society’s controlling forces – the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs – with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.
This surreal fable, set in America’s Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America.
Fantastical and humorous, ‘The Place of Dead Roads’ continues William Burroughs’ exploration of society’s controlling forces – the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs – with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.
268 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
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3327 people want to read
About the author
William S. Burroughs
449 books7,018 followersWilliam Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer.
A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century".
His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.
Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.
He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation.
Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift", a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".
Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century".
His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.
Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.
He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation.
Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift", a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".
Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
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August 13, 2018
In The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs takes a detour through the American Old West, beginning with the 1899 death of writer/gunslinger Kim Carsons in a Colorado shootout. From there the story unfolds in a nonlinear telling of Kim’s past experience -- across vast swaths of time and space, under various forms and guises -- as professional assassin and prominent member of “The Johnson Family” (incidentally, the novel’s original title). The Johnsons are a brotherhood of honorable thieves and other itinerants who play Robin Hood to the rapacious Sherif of Nottingham represented by the Immortality Control Board of Venus and their unwitting minions in government, religion, and other organizations of Earthly control. As might be expected, the goal of the Venusian conspiracy is to prevent our souls from ever reaching the Western Lands and the genuine immortality that awaits therein, keeping us forever trapped in a scheme of systematic vampirism that, like the serfdoms of medieval times and the wage slavery common to most modern states, is far from symbiotic in nature. In Kim’s words:
"We’re not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It’s ours and we’re going to take it. And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog."
The ancient Egyptians pioneered the preservation of the physical body and protection of the immortal soul through a marriage of science and the arcane, but compared to what Kim has in mind, their methods were crude and uncivilized at best. To begin with, mummification was something that only the obscenely rich could ever hope to afford, thus putting this route to immortality in direct conflict with Kim’s own aims. But even if this privilege were equally available to all members of society, the logistics involved in shielding each and every mummy from the elements, vandals, and inevitable nuclear war were far too staggering to even consider. Besides, where on Earth would they even find the space to store them all?
Unlike the pharaohs and their obsession with securing impregnable tombs underground, or the astronauts and their insistence on having their entire “awkward life process encapsulated and transported [with them] into Space”, Kim searches for a way that we might ditch our flawed form altogether on our way through the cosmos and the six cities between us and the Western Lands. He considers the human body to be the prison that keeps us stuck in our inescapable cycle of sex and death, one which only furthers the aims of those feeding off our vital life energies. Therefore, just:
"[a]s a prisoner serving a life sentence can think only of escape, so Kim takes for granted that the only purpose of his life is space travel. [...] The alien medium we glimpse beyond Time is Space. And that is where we are going. [...] Kim considers that immortality is the only goal worth striving for. He knows that it isn’t something you just automatically get for believing some nonsense or other like Christianity or Islam. It is something you have to work and fight for, like everything else in this life or another."
Though vanished from this Earth now for over one hundred thousand years already, the cities may yet exist on other planes and planets, after all. And if a soul is able to project itself through space as well as time, no longer encumbered by its physical vessel, then its odds of locating the first station on the pilgrimage (Tamaghis) go from infinitesimal to infinite. For now anyway, the rest of us remain permanently earthbound and stranded, wandering through countless lives forever, somewhere along the dead roads:
‘‘And what is a dead road? Well, señor, somebody you used to meet, uno amigo, tal vez....” Remember a red brick house on Jane Street? Your breath quickens as you mount the worn red-carpeted stairs.... The road to 4 calle Larachi, Tangier, or 24 Arundle Terrace in London? So many dead roads you will never use again ... a flickering gray haze of old photos ... pools of darkness in the street like spilled ink ... a dim movie marquee with smoky yellow bulbs ... red-haired boy with a dead-white face. The guide points to a map of South America. “Here, señor ... is the Place of Dead Roads.”
On to The Western Lands.
"We’re not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It’s ours and we’re going to take it. And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog."
The ancient Egyptians pioneered the preservation of the physical body and protection of the immortal soul through a marriage of science and the arcane, but compared to what Kim has in mind, their methods were crude and uncivilized at best. To begin with, mummification was something that only the obscenely rich could ever hope to afford, thus putting this route to immortality in direct conflict with Kim’s own aims. But even if this privilege were equally available to all members of society, the logistics involved in shielding each and every mummy from the elements, vandals, and inevitable nuclear war were far too staggering to even consider. Besides, where on Earth would they even find the space to store them all?
Unlike the pharaohs and their obsession with securing impregnable tombs underground, or the astronauts and their insistence on having their entire “awkward life process encapsulated and transported [with them] into Space”, Kim searches for a way that we might ditch our flawed form altogether on our way through the cosmos and the six cities between us and the Western Lands. He considers the human body to be the prison that keeps us stuck in our inescapable cycle of sex and death, one which only furthers the aims of those feeding off our vital life energies. Therefore, just:
"[a]s a prisoner serving a life sentence can think only of escape, so Kim takes for granted that the only purpose of his life is space travel. [...] The alien medium we glimpse beyond Time is Space. And that is where we are going. [...] Kim considers that immortality is the only goal worth striving for. He knows that it isn’t something you just automatically get for believing some nonsense or other like Christianity or Islam. It is something you have to work and fight for, like everything else in this life or another."
Though vanished from this Earth now for over one hundred thousand years already, the cities may yet exist on other planes and planets, after all. And if a soul is able to project itself through space as well as time, no longer encumbered by its physical vessel, then its odds of locating the first station on the pilgrimage (Tamaghis) go from infinitesimal to infinite. For now anyway, the rest of us remain permanently earthbound and stranded, wandering through countless lives forever, somewhere along the dead roads:
‘‘And what is a dead road? Well, señor, somebody you used to meet, uno amigo, tal vez....” Remember a red brick house on Jane Street? Your breath quickens as you mount the worn red-carpeted stairs.... The road to 4 calle Larachi, Tangier, or 24 Arundle Terrace in London? So many dead roads you will never use again ... a flickering gray haze of old photos ... pools of darkness in the street like spilled ink ... a dim movie marquee with smoky yellow bulbs ... red-haired boy with a dead-white face. The guide points to a map of South America. “Here, señor ... is the Place of Dead Roads.”
On to The Western Lands.
February 11, 2020
In the 80s, Burroughs was back in New York, appearing in Laurie Anderson songs, and writing his last trilogy of strange and garbled not-exactly-sci-fi novels. And this fragmented western, starring Denton Welch (according to Burroughs' introduction for In Youth is Pleasure -- what would Welch have thought of this? I see the connection, but Welch's subversion and antisocial impulses are deliciously subtle, Burroughs' billboarded constantly) -- but anyway, this fragmented postmodern western was the middle volume. Back to Welch and the subtlety of his subversion: Burroughs definitely does not subvert subtly. Here, he subverts in broadcasts and direct address, in best crank mode -- railing against gun control, the government, women (albeit mostly they're just ignored as irrelevant to his mostly-gay world), alien mind control.
Whether or not Burroughs was a crazy person, he writes like one. Often he writes like a crazy person who might be objectionable, were his vision not so wholly fantastical (though not to deny the satiric targets here either). Often, he writes like a crazy person beautifully. There are stretches of this where bizarre scenes just spill out in hypervivid details eliding between locations, scenes, realities, grabbing full attention. That said, compared to Naked Lunch, there's an essentially linear progression here on which to pin the swirling variations, holding the variations somewhat the story of one shootist on his path out of society and across the world, time, the universe, and back to an inescapable meeting.
Some of the book (writing like a crazy person) breaks up into catalogs of weapons, deaths, ways to die. But then some of the best bits towards the end are incredible catalogues of addictions and diseases. The sequence involving the search for the origins of language, and the ensuing epidemic of The Yacks is possibly the most wholly inspired here, but it amounts to a few pages hanging barely connected to the rest. These lurching fragments, these thematic riffs, tantalizing as they are, also give a sense that the book (ie the interior of Burroughs head, it seems) runs on endlessly, endlessly offering up grotesque and brilliant vignettes. Which makes it hard to get a sense of pacing here, at least after the first part or so. Does it matter? The book continues until it ends. As must this review, which, infected, also doesn't seem to have any true sense of purpose or pacing.
Whether or not Burroughs was a crazy person, he writes like one. Often he writes like a crazy person who might be objectionable, were his vision not so wholly fantastical (though not to deny the satiric targets here either). Often, he writes like a crazy person beautifully. There are stretches of this where bizarre scenes just spill out in hypervivid details eliding between locations, scenes, realities, grabbing full attention. That said, compared to Naked Lunch, there's an essentially linear progression here on which to pin the swirling variations, holding the variations somewhat the story of one shootist on his path out of society and across the world, time, the universe, and back to an inescapable meeting.
Some of the book (writing like a crazy person) breaks up into catalogs of weapons, deaths, ways to die. But then some of the best bits towards the end are incredible catalogues of addictions and diseases. The sequence involving the search for the origins of language, and the ensuing epidemic of The Yacks is possibly the most wholly inspired here, but it amounts to a few pages hanging barely connected to the rest. These lurching fragments, these thematic riffs, tantalizing as they are, also give a sense that the book (ie the interior of Burroughs head, it seems) runs on endlessly, endlessly offering up grotesque and brilliant vignettes. Which makes it hard to get a sense of pacing here, at least after the first part or so. Does it matter? The book continues until it ends. As must this review, which, infected, also doesn't seem to have any true sense of purpose or pacing.
June 28, 2017
This book is garbage nonsense and Burroughs is a terrible author—glad I double-checked those facts and don't have to again ;)
June 26, 2019
A totally awesome novel, the best I have read so far in 2014. Burroughs is one of my favourite writers and I feel he actually improved as he got older. His later books have all the outrageous flights of fancy of his more experimental work but they are expressed in much more tightly controlled prose.
The Place of Dead Roads is an ironic psychedelic Western but it's also a prime example of lateral science fiction; and the ideas and conceits it shoots off have enough potential energy and promise to fuel dozens of ordinary SF and fantasy novels. Burroughs is a writer with an extremely generous mind who can afford to scatter dozens or hundreds of amazing and unique ideas throughout a text, any single one of which would form the basis for an entire novel by an ordinary writer.
The core of a Burroughs text is the 'routine', when a casual word or image or idea triggers an extended tall tale or skit, usually comic and grotesque and very odd, that goes off at tangents to the main story, which itself is an interlocking mesh composed entirely of tangents. The Burroughs-style 'routine' has been a big influence on me. I find it a funny, enthralling and satisfying technique. Burroughs is the absolute master at its deployment.
The Place of Dead Roads is an ironic psychedelic Western but it's also a prime example of lateral science fiction; and the ideas and conceits it shoots off have enough potential energy and promise to fuel dozens of ordinary SF and fantasy novels. Burroughs is a writer with an extremely generous mind who can afford to scatter dozens or hundreds of amazing and unique ideas throughout a text, any single one of which would form the basis for an entire novel by an ordinary writer.
The core of a Burroughs text is the 'routine', when a casual word or image or idea triggers an extended tall tale or skit, usually comic and grotesque and very odd, that goes off at tangents to the main story, which itself is an interlocking mesh composed entirely of tangents. The Burroughs-style 'routine' has been a big influence on me. I find it a funny, enthralling and satisfying technique. Burroughs is the absolute master at its deployment.
April 30, 2008
William Burroughs comes in at least three stages. I would recommend reading his books in order, because in a sense one gets a narrative history of the Avant-Garde writing via his works.
This is his last great period in literature. Here he's an old man commenting on the Western of sorts. A place where a liberated man could do his own thing withhout anyone bothering him. The ultimate libertarian, Burroughs is actually very conservative soul which may surprise people. But again what makes him great is his 'voice' which is super funny. He's a kook, but a kook you would like to have a drink with.
This is his last great period in literature. Here he's an old man commenting on the Western of sorts. A place where a liberated man could do his own thing withhout anyone bothering him. The ultimate libertarian, Burroughs is actually very conservative soul which may surprise people. But again what makes him great is his 'voice' which is super funny. He's a kook, but a kook you would like to have a drink with.
January 12, 2019
Kim Carson’s a gay time travelling gunslinger. The prose is superb if a bit baffling at times. Lots of different scenes, weird creatures, guns and more guns as well as addictions in every form. One thing that cannot be disputed is that Burroughs has a vivid imagination.
March 7, 2012
I read this book, and its prequel, Cities of the Red Night, for the first time when I was in college, and a lot of it went over my head. Interestingly (and perhaps because of this), I also came out of it convinced that Burroughs was a genius, and that his every word should be taken as the Gospel Truth. Looking at it now, I "get" what he's saying a lot better, and I find that I disagree with him more.
This book begins as a gay Western, with some sci fi interludes, and gradually becomes more bizarre and non-chronological. The protagonist is Kim Carsons, who may or may not be a fictional character from the writings of "William Seward Hall," a man who died in a shootout at the turn of the century, and presumably an alter-ego for Burroughs himself. Carsons is a misfit, a rebel, an expert shootist, and an insatiable homophile. We watch Carsons as he develops from a shy but dangerous teenager into the leader of a movement called "the Johnson Family," which, Burroughs explains, was a term "to designate good bums and thieves," which was "elaborated into a code of conduct." In the book, it elaborates still further, into a vast international organization fighting authority and preparing humanity for the evolutionary leap it must take to colonize the stars.
Much of the book is actually propaganda for Burroughs' own views regarding sexuality, conformity, the State, space exploration, human transcendence, and gun rights. For all that, Burroughs is a skillful artist, who doesn't allow polemic to overwhelm his prose - in fact, at times exactly the opposite takes place. Burroughs was that rarest of combinations, a poet and a political thinker, and only rarely did he lose sight of the art in his work. It is probably for this reason that he remains so influential. While in some way each of his books is a rant in favor of his own viewpoint, he never descends to the transparency of an Ayn Rand. Burroughs allowed creativity to dominate, which is probably why some of his "genius" insights into politics seem questionable to me now. They are unsystematic, often the result of trying to push a stray thought to its logical conclusion, and intended to be more shocking than insightful. He is also an expert eroticist, although that will be disturbing to anyone who is unprepared for such explicit scenes of gay sex. This was one area I got more out of the second time around.
This book is less explicitly misogynist than its predecessor, but there remains a disdain/disinterest/suspicion of women in the subtext. Women characters are rare, and they are often disgusting, evil, and/or stupid. The exception is Salt Chunk Mary, a de-sexualized grande dame of Burroughs' imagined underworld. She isn't particularly well-developed as a character, although the same could be said of many of the male characters. At least she never turns out to be part of the alien conspiracy to enslave humanity, which is itself a concession on Burroughs' part.
For all the criticisms I've put into this review, it remains a a very enjoyable work of fiction, and earns four stars for being something I'm glad I took the time to return to.
This book begins as a gay Western, with some sci fi interludes, and gradually becomes more bizarre and non-chronological. The protagonist is Kim Carsons, who may or may not be a fictional character from the writings of "William Seward Hall," a man who died in a shootout at the turn of the century, and presumably an alter-ego for Burroughs himself. Carsons is a misfit, a rebel, an expert shootist, and an insatiable homophile. We watch Carsons as he develops from a shy but dangerous teenager into the leader of a movement called "the Johnson Family," which, Burroughs explains, was a term "to designate good bums and thieves," which was "elaborated into a code of conduct." In the book, it elaborates still further, into a vast international organization fighting authority and preparing humanity for the evolutionary leap it must take to colonize the stars.
Much of the book is actually propaganda for Burroughs' own views regarding sexuality, conformity, the State, space exploration, human transcendence, and gun rights. For all that, Burroughs is a skillful artist, who doesn't allow polemic to overwhelm his prose - in fact, at times exactly the opposite takes place. Burroughs was that rarest of combinations, a poet and a political thinker, and only rarely did he lose sight of the art in his work. It is probably for this reason that he remains so influential. While in some way each of his books is a rant in favor of his own viewpoint, he never descends to the transparency of an Ayn Rand. Burroughs allowed creativity to dominate, which is probably why some of his "genius" insights into politics seem questionable to me now. They are unsystematic, often the result of trying to push a stray thought to its logical conclusion, and intended to be more shocking than insightful. He is also an expert eroticist, although that will be disturbing to anyone who is unprepared for such explicit scenes of gay sex. This was one area I got more out of the second time around.
This book is less explicitly misogynist than its predecessor, but there remains a disdain/disinterest/suspicion of women in the subtext. Women characters are rare, and they are often disgusting, evil, and/or stupid. The exception is Salt Chunk Mary, a de-sexualized grande dame of Burroughs' imagined underworld. She isn't particularly well-developed as a character, although the same could be said of many of the male characters. At least she never turns out to be part of the alien conspiracy to enslave humanity, which is itself a concession on Burroughs' part.
For all the criticisms I've put into this review, it remains a a very enjoyable work of fiction, and earns four stars for being something I'm glad I took the time to return to.
February 20, 2017
(Nu kanske jag bara ger alla Burroughs böcker fem stjärnor av princip. Men. Det fanns passager i boken som var tillräckligt bortom-denna-värld i genialitet/galenskap att jag tycker den förtjänar det. Även om inget i boken var jämförbart med/lika kul som den bisarra politiken som styr den röda nattens städer i "Cities of the Red Night".)
"The place of Dead Roads" är andra delen av den trilogi som börjar med "Cities of the Red Night" och avslutas med "The Western Lands". Jag undrar hur mycket av trilogin som är en färd genom Burroughs pojkrum. "Cities of the Red Night": pirater, aliens, serietidningar, magiker och privatsnokar. "The place of Dead Roads": Western. Western western western. Nästan lite väl mycket western. Kim Carsons som en homosexuell, satanistisk Clint Eastwood. Men vi hinner också åka en sväng till Venus och umgås med rymdvarelser, samt åka på lite djungelexpeditioner i bästa Tintin-anda.
Vem är Kim Carsons? Ett alias för författaren William S. Hall, som blir skjuten 1899. I sin tur ett alias för författaren William S. Burroughs(1914-1997)? Möjligen.
Vem han än är har han bra klädsmak, några outfits:
Knä-lång kappa i tusenfotingsskinn, kavaj i rött siden, tricorne i blått siden, gula silkesbyxor, stövlar av ålskinn. Och i bältet ett magiskt svärd, i handen en kristallkikare. Nåja, lite pirat har han nog i sig ändå.
Han har även en pestkappa i sin kollektion, svart kamelull, insydd med variga lymfkörtlar, tuberkulos och spetälska. En familjeklenod! Den luktar värre än den ser ut.
Genom boken får vi följa Kim på hans resor fram och tillbaka genom tiden, då han utför blandade ärenden, som att hitta dalen där det mänskliga talet uppstod, eller skjuta en galen hund åt en gammal man som är för blödig för att klarar av det själv.
Kims mål: tidens slut. Eller att åka till rymden genom astral projektion. Eden är en rymdstation kallad "The Western Lands". Vidare mot upplösningen i del tre.
(Jag förväntar mig ingen upplösning. Jag förväntar mig att slutet kommer vara som att vakna upp ur en dröm, som man önskar man kunnat sova vidare i för att komma fram till drömmens upplösning. Sen minns man att den här upplösningen inte existerar, alternativt, man kan lika gärna nå den med sin vakna fantasi som sin sovande. Vilket kanske också är den lärdom Burroughs försöker förmedla. Återkommer om tio år eller när nu jag ger ut min Burroughs-avhandling.)
"The place of Dead Roads" är andra delen av den trilogi som börjar med "Cities of the Red Night" och avslutas med "The Western Lands". Jag undrar hur mycket av trilogin som är en färd genom Burroughs pojkrum. "Cities of the Red Night": pirater, aliens, serietidningar, magiker och privatsnokar. "The place of Dead Roads": Western. Western western western. Nästan lite väl mycket western. Kim Carsons som en homosexuell, satanistisk Clint Eastwood. Men vi hinner också åka en sväng till Venus och umgås med rymdvarelser, samt åka på lite djungelexpeditioner i bästa Tintin-anda.
Vem är Kim Carsons? Ett alias för författaren William S. Hall, som blir skjuten 1899. I sin tur ett alias för författaren William S. Burroughs(1914-1997)? Möjligen.
Vem han än är har han bra klädsmak, några outfits:
Knä-lång kappa i tusenfotingsskinn, kavaj i rött siden, tricorne i blått siden, gula silkesbyxor, stövlar av ålskinn. Och i bältet ett magiskt svärd, i handen en kristallkikare. Nåja, lite pirat har han nog i sig ändå.
Han har även en pestkappa i sin kollektion, svart kamelull, insydd med variga lymfkörtlar, tuberkulos och spetälska. En familjeklenod! Den luktar värre än den ser ut.
Genom boken får vi följa Kim på hans resor fram och tillbaka genom tiden, då han utför blandade ärenden, som att hitta dalen där det mänskliga talet uppstod, eller skjuta en galen hund åt en gammal man som är för blödig för att klarar av det själv.
Kims mål: tidens slut. Eller att åka till rymden genom astral projektion. Eden är en rymdstation kallad "The Western Lands". Vidare mot upplösningen i del tre.
(Jag förväntar mig ingen upplösning. Jag förväntar mig att slutet kommer vara som att vakna upp ur en dröm, som man önskar man kunnat sova vidare i för att komma fram till drömmens upplösning. Sen minns man att den här upplösningen inte existerar, alternativt, man kan lika gärna nå den med sin vakna fantasi som sin sovande. Vilket kanske också är den lärdom Burroughs försöker förmedla. Återkommer om tio år eller när nu jag ger ut min Burroughs-avhandling.)
June 17, 2018
To say this is a chaotic, messed up book is a feeble attempt at words. Burroughs takes his sociopathic anti-hero Kim Carsons on a journey through time, space and the planet making astute observations or what can only be the author's drug addled statements. Burroughs has a masterful ability with language, and I laughed out loud a number of times. I also had just as many wtf moments. This is not for everyone, but for some of you, check it out.
August 5, 2019
It’s Burroughs, what can I say. Not really a novel, more like a stream of consciousness. This was truly word salad, but still interesting and filled with really good quotes. I enjoyed it, but can’t really give it more than 3 stars. Burroughs fans will like this but not recommended for the Burroughs newbie. Not his greatest, but really not his worst either. 3 stars means “I liked it” An easy read for Burroughs as well.
July 2, 2019
He’s tired and nostalgic and a bit satiated but it’s still old Bill....
July 16, 2021
anal mucus smells like a polecat or carrion but i use it to lube up my intricate gun talk i can barely register as real words w meaning. but that’s just how it is in the wild-west/outerspace/pareetangier, we wash ourselves down with carbolic soap just like anyone else. i might sound a bit paranoid and deranged but i just fucking hate the rich i swear.
August 16, 2011
I read this about 15 years ago when my tastes were apparently more callow than they are now, because flicking through it now I don't like it nearly as much as I did then. It reads like the rough sketch for a screenplay or for a comic strip - kind of slapstick. Burroughs might not be trying to shock all the way through, but I suspect he is - yet it's not written well enough to trigger much shock. The f word certainly doesn't do it anymore, and the gory scenes in the book are too unpolished to evoke much. Random sample: "It hits. A player is down ... a broken idiot thing ... drooling, slobbering, pus oozing from the cataracts that cluster at his dead burnt-out eyes ... He will be left to the terrible urchins who haunt the mask courts." (p.209) There's just no poetry there. For all Burroughs' personal ponderousness, this book just reads like a dime store novel and doesn't, for me at least, offer much of a glimpse into the arcane dimension that Burroughs fancied he inhabited.
January 31, 2019
This is an astonishing book. It is full of surprises, or perhaps better, the unexpected. I'm now seriously considering reading Cities of the Red Night and The Western Lands, the other two in this trilogy.
May 26, 2020
Oddly, rated the other books in this so-called trilogy, but not this one.
WSB revisits all his favourite themes, here through the feverish lens of the American west.
The three books of this unconventional trilogy are a distillation of a writer’s life work, and can be read in any order.
WSB revisits all his favourite themes, here through the feverish lens of the American west.
The three books of this unconventional trilogy are a distillation of a writer’s life work, and can be read in any order.
March 4, 2011
A great Novel. All the borrowing here has been acknowledged.
September 5, 2011
Slightly more coherent in terms of plot than Burroughs other work, but enjoyable nonetheless.
August 31, 2014
Sure has a lot of dicks in it.
February 13, 2015
A heroína,as armas e as lutas loucas!
Estradas...
Estradas...
November 5, 2022
This book is almost impossible to rate. There were times I thot this was gonna be a solid 3 star book thru and thru, and then a single paragraph would have me back at "holy shit, 5 stars, I have comprehended the Burroughs' worldview and I gotta get me some heroin stat." And it is a fucking wacky, wild, completely out of this world and outright reality defying worldview that burroughs conveys with this story within a story within a much larger film makers hack directorial debut?? From interplanetary colonization, to wildly romantic western vistas of cowpokes and shootouts, all with Burroughs' absurd wit and world building abounding. No real storyline to be found any where. Themes of alienation and sex, duh, its a Burroughs book. Themes of self-actualization and revolution. Again, no real storyline to be found anywhere, and yet our main character is written incredibly well. Whether burroughs is waxing poetic about disease, evolution, cosmological or sociological truths, guns, or painting bizarrely scenic landscapes of colors and emotions unimaginable, or being pretty problematic (racist language, consistent sexualization of young men (but its all homoerotic so that makes it okay, NOT))... Well except for that last part, Burroughs is a really fucking enjoyable writer. And honestly I'm not sure if the romanticization of young men dying in shootouts and being outlaws by the age of 14 isn't all part of the larger "death of innocence" thing Burroughs has got goin on. But either way, it left a sour taste in my mouth, which is probably exactly what the old pervert wanted.
If you don't like linear plots, heck if you just don't like straightforward anything, and you're like "huh, I need a book where the entire premise is scrapped at every new chapter, with a worldview that really puts viruses, reincarnation and time and space travel at the forefront," this book is for you. "I want a book that reads like the writer hates me." This book is for you.
If you don't like linear plots, heck if you just don't like straightforward anything, and you're like "huh, I need a book where the entire premise is scrapped at every new chapter, with a worldview that really puts viruses, reincarnation and time and space travel at the forefront," this book is for you. "I want a book that reads like the writer hates me." This book is for you.
August 28, 2024
So it's a western, but it's a sci-fi, and it's about guns and sex, but also about the impossible search for immortality, and like... it's about an oppressive alien species preventing humanity from actually achieving said immortality, but it's also about the oppression that the ruling class imposes on those 'below' them. Oh wait, those are the same thing.
Curious to see how this trilogy wraps up. I preferred the first one, but this was very good too.
Curious to see how this trilogy wraps up. I preferred the first one, but this was very good too.
March 19, 2023
Read this as a teenager and didn't get on with it. Clearly I was an idiot, as it's a remarkable novel; fresh, provocative, bullish, even. Language and imagery are stretched and warped, resulting in something unsettling and unforgettable.
January 6, 2023
Gunplay, assplay, conspiracies… and an exploding Act III.
A Burroughs book.
A Burroughs book.
January 18, 2025
Wafer thin and confused plot. Passages of text with no sense, just words on a page. Avoid at all costs!
October 12, 2024
Yeehaw
fic-guided
August 12, 2020Burroughs published this novel aged seventy. He was, by this stage of his surprisingly long life (surprising because of his loudly proclaimed excesses), Literature’s Grand Old Junky. Almost respectable. It was his habit (loaded word) to kick off his fiction in deadpan documentary style, thereafter spiralling away into increasingly wild fantasy. The Place of Dead Roads begins, lucidly enough, with an 1899 newspaper account of a doubly fatal shoot-out in Boulder, Colorado, between two men of mystery: William Seward Hall, a real-estate speculator and writer, and Mike Chase. Neither man fired his weapon (later we learn that Hall carried a .44 Special Action, Chase a .455 Webley; Burroughs had a great love of guns). Both Hall and Chase died by rifle-fire from an unknown third party. Hall, it is reported, wrote under the pen-name and in the person of Kim Carsons, the famous Western shootist (fictional, but evocative of historical gun-man Kit Carson). He is the central character of The Place of Dead Roads.
From this initial point, the narrative spills out like some nasty liquid, in any number of non-linear directions, following the oblique spurts of Burroughs’ sado-sexual fantasies, paranoid obsessions, and surreal machineries. In the largest sense, Burroughs’ career was dedicated to the discovery, or invention, of a territory for his outlawry: an ‘interzone’, or no man’s (certainly no woman’s) land where his immoralities could have free play. In his personal practices as a homosexual and an opiate user, Tangier served him best. In this novel, Burroughs presents an imagined community of ‘Johnsons’ living undercover (complete with female impersonators to fool the straights) in Johnsonville. The Johnsons plan an eventual escape from Planet Earth by spaceship. They meanwhile give their attention to evolution-enhancing experiments ‘designed to produce asexual offspring, to cloning, use of artificial wombs, and transfer operations’. As an outlaw gang, the ‘Wild Fruits’, they dedicate themselves to merciless terrorism against ‘normals’, or the ‘shits’, as they are uncompromisingly labelled.
The conceit at the core of The Place of Dead Roads is that the ‘shits of the world’ are epidemically infected by a virus, a rabid alien parasite descended from outer space, apparently Venusian in origin. This ‘RIGHT’ virus (so called because its hosts are possessed with a frenzied sense of their own rectitude) leads them to fanatical persecution of such victimless crimes (normal behaviour for the virally uninfected) as homosexuality, obscenity, drink and drug use. Civilisation, religion, conventional morality and heterosexuality are (in the Burroughs universe) viral and pathogenic. In its wilder, more vindictive flights, The Place of Dead Roads fantasises about a mass clean-up (or ‘shiticide’) programme, in which Christians – the main vectors of the moralistic Venusian planetary virus – will be pinpointed and assassinated by Johnsons. Kim Carsons, in one comic sub-plot, destroys the inhabitants of the nearby town of Jehovah by distributing free illustrated Bibles impregnated with smallpox virus. Nazi genocide is evoked by the Johnsons’ SS (‘Shit Slaughter’) commandos, who are formed to undertake a hygienic final solution and rid the universe of Christian, temperate heterosexuals.
Burroughs’ burlesques of science fiction, Western dime novels and – in one hilarious excursion – The Godfather are brilliantly done. He ranks with Joyce as a parodist. But no author of the twentieth century was more calculatedly, and inventively, offensive. At one point in The Place of Dead Roads he lets rip with an emetic salvo of Anglophobia (he never forgave the country for its Crown prosecution of NAKED LUNCH). ‘What hope’, the narrative sarcastically enquires, ‘for a country where people will camp out for three days to glimpse the Royal Couple?. . . Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-land is built. The Queen stabilises the whole stinking shithouse.’ Never himself afraid to go too far in any direction, Burroughs goes on to devise a little fantasia in which Her Majesty, commiserating with the parents of Aberfan on the tragic deaths of 116 of their children under the 1966 tip slide, is stunk out by a virtuoso farting guerrilla attached to the Johnsonian underground army. She ‘never made another public appearance’, the narrative gleefully records.
From this initial point, the narrative spills out like some nasty liquid, in any number of non-linear directions, following the oblique spurts of Burroughs’ sado-sexual fantasies, paranoid obsessions, and surreal machineries. In the largest sense, Burroughs’ career was dedicated to the discovery, or invention, of a territory for his outlawry: an ‘interzone’, or no man’s (certainly no woman’s) land where his immoralities could have free play. In his personal practices as a homosexual and an opiate user, Tangier served him best. In this novel, Burroughs presents an imagined community of ‘Johnsons’ living undercover (complete with female impersonators to fool the straights) in Johnsonville. The Johnsons plan an eventual escape from Planet Earth by spaceship. They meanwhile give their attention to evolution-enhancing experiments ‘designed to produce asexual offspring, to cloning, use of artificial wombs, and transfer operations’. As an outlaw gang, the ‘Wild Fruits’, they dedicate themselves to merciless terrorism against ‘normals’, or the ‘shits’, as they are uncompromisingly labelled.
The conceit at the core of The Place of Dead Roads is that the ‘shits of the world’ are epidemically infected by a virus, a rabid alien parasite descended from outer space, apparently Venusian in origin. This ‘RIGHT’ virus (so called because its hosts are possessed with a frenzied sense of their own rectitude) leads them to fanatical persecution of such victimless crimes (normal behaviour for the virally uninfected) as homosexuality, obscenity, drink and drug use. Civilisation, religion, conventional morality and heterosexuality are (in the Burroughs universe) viral and pathogenic. In its wilder, more vindictive flights, The Place of Dead Roads fantasises about a mass clean-up (or ‘shiticide’) programme, in which Christians – the main vectors of the moralistic Venusian planetary virus – will be pinpointed and assassinated by Johnsons. Kim Carsons, in one comic sub-plot, destroys the inhabitants of the nearby town of Jehovah by distributing free illustrated Bibles impregnated with smallpox virus. Nazi genocide is evoked by the Johnsons’ SS (‘Shit Slaughter’) commandos, who are formed to undertake a hygienic final solution and rid the universe of Christian, temperate heterosexuals.
Burroughs’ burlesques of science fiction, Western dime novels and – in one hilarious excursion – The Godfather are brilliantly done. He ranks with Joyce as a parodist. But no author of the twentieth century was more calculatedly, and inventively, offensive. At one point in The Place of Dead Roads he lets rip with an emetic salvo of Anglophobia (he never forgave the country for its Crown prosecution of NAKED LUNCH). ‘What hope’, the narrative sarcastically enquires, ‘for a country where people will camp out for three days to glimpse the Royal Couple?. . . Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-land is built. The Queen stabilises the whole stinking shithouse.’ Never himself afraid to go too far in any direction, Burroughs goes on to devise a little fantasia in which Her Majesty, commiserating with the parents of Aberfan on the tragic deaths of 116 of their children under the 1966 tip slide, is stunk out by a virtuoso farting guerrilla attached to the Johnsonian underground army. She ‘never made another public appearance’, the narrative gleefully records.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 30, 2025
The later works of William S. Burroughs have attracted less attention than his earlier writings. By the 1980s, Burroughs was living off his reputation more than his art. He was living in an abandoned YMCA in Manhattan, hanging out in his orgone accumulator and talking to ghosts. He was also hanging out in CBGB’s with Patti Smith who claimed she admired him so much because he was so difficult to get into bed. Well y’know Patti, a gay junky pushing 70 probably isn’t the best horse to bet on, even if you are a woman with hairy armpits (see the cover of her Easter LP).But he hadn’t been forgotten. Musicians in the punk and first wave industrial music scenes had taken interest in him and his earlier works remained perennial classics in the underground art and literary scenes. He was in desperate need of money so he decided to revive his career. The Nova Convention brought him back into the public eye and he even did an introduction for the opening of a Saturday Night Live episode. Along with this he published a trilogy of novels that were not entirely palatable to most readers of the time. But Burroughs being Burroughs has never been specific to one particular time or place. It may be time for a novel like The Place of Dead Roads to be reconsidered, especially considering our current political climate.
William S. Burroughs always defied categories. Whether he could be classified as a Beat Generation or a science-fiction author can be infinitely debatable. Burroughs would have advised you to not waste time on such distinctions since categories are arbitrary by nature. But you can’t deny that, up to a certain point, this novel is a western. But, just as much, it is a science-fiction novel although nobody else has ever written science-fiction the way Burroughs did. In fact no one else every wrote a western the way he did either. But neither of these categories hold since it could just as well be a work of surrealism, romanticism, pulp crime, gay fictions, utopianism, dystopianism, postmodernism, or anything else you could possibly think of. Burroughs is just a category unto himself.
But true to his own style, his 1980s novels defy his own niche that he created in the earlier years of his writing. Most of his earlier works had no plot or character development. They were mostly series of dream sequences and vignettes with characters that extended no further than what they did in each scene. On the other hand, in The Place of Dead Roads there is both plot and character development. This is definitely new territory for this most unconventional of all unconventional authors.
Kim Carsons is a young man who inherits a plot of rural land after his parents die. When arriving in the nearest town, he buys an arsenal of guns which get excessively described in pornographic detail. The eroticism of guns is firmly established early in the story. Kim brings another boy to his rustic cabin and the two look over his guns before having sex. Soon after, Kim goes out to the woods, sets up targets, and begins shooting. While doing so, a faun appears and then they have sex. But the sex is a kind of foreplay for gun shooting which they do in between bouts of intercourse.
Kim begins to attract a group of followers, all male and gay. They indulge freely in carnal pleasures and have gun fights with those who don’t respect them, primarily homophobic bullies and Christians who won’t leave them alone. They also practice sex magic rituals in which ejaculations function like guns, shooting psychically charged deadly venom at their visualized enemies, killing them from a distance without leaving a trace of evidence. The boys quickly gain a reputation for being outlaws and expert shootists who should never be messed with. They dub themselves the Johnson Gang and live by an ethos of everyone minding their own business. This means they demand the freedom to live close to nature, far from the modern world of technology, where they can indulge in sex and drugs. Anybody who intrudes on them has basically signed their own death certificate. The descriptions are explicit and brutal; Burroughs writes about violence with as much passion as he writes about guns and sex. To the chagrin of most feminists, this novel is a celebration of phallo-centrism to an extreme and the vision is one of a masculine society free from the presence of women. Burroughs doesn’t express any animosity towards women. It’s just that they barely exist in the world he writes about.
One interesting passage near the beginning, when Burroughs describes Kim’s childhood and relationship with his artist father, involves the boy writing a science-fiction story and submitting it to Boy’s Life magazine for publication. The story is about some half-human/half-giant insect creatures on a search and destroy mission in a jungle river gorge on Venus. (This passage seems to parallel a chapter in Cities Of the Red Night where the pirates invade Panama City) This bizarre story is so far from anything that would ever be published in the vanilla teenage magazine that it serves to illustrate how distant Kim feels from boring, mainstream America at the onset of his adolescence. Incidentally, Kim travels to Venus in some later chapters of this novel.
Later on, Kim leaves his rural property and travels around America, sometimes with the Johnson Gang and sometimes without them. He liaises with various members of an underground network of gay criminals. Sometimes he is involved with hit jobs on the Mafia. The already thin plot begins to wear even thinner. But then we hear from a visitor from outer space whose space ship crash landed in the desert and released a virus into the world. This takes on significance later.
Meanwhile, Kim travels to Europe and begins working as a secret agent, taking on different identities as he goes along. If you think you can read any Burroughs novel without getting thoroughly confused at some point, you are wrong. It becomes hard to tell when Kim is Kim acting under an assumed identity and when a character isn’t Kim at all. Watching him change personas is like watching a blackjack dealer shuffle a deck of cards; you can briefly see what each card is but they go by so fast they all blur together. Even more disorienting is the way Kim can be at a dinner party with spies in France one minutes, then he opens a door and comes out as someone different in Morocco. Any sense of linearity or stability of character disappears. We get led around the world to Burroughs’ favorite haunts like Ecuador, Colombia, London, Paris, and Tangier. Kim shoots up heroin and methadone, visits exotic weapons dealers in North African bazaars, receives coded messages from secret agents in Gibraltar, and goes to a high level drug dealer’s party and gets seduced by a woman who changes sexes. All the while he’s probably some kind of secret agent being contacted by entities in outer space. Who knows what it all amounts to, but the hallucinatory nature of it all makes you question if Burroughs is expressing the feeling of shifting in and out of altered states of consciousness while using drugs.
The most baffling passage is when Kim is living on Venus with his boyfriend. The two live together in a cabin that is described as being similar to the cabin he inhabits in Missouri at the beginning of the novel. This kind of overlapping is a key feature in many of Burroughs’ writings. He leaves to walk around a tourist resort which he at first says is in Egypt, but as he goes away, unauthorized, from the designated resort, he wanders into a nightmarish world where he finds houses full of dwarfs. Centipedes are emerging from the dwarfs’ heads and shedding them as if the little men are cocoons for the monster insects. Kim can do nothing but shoot them and burn the place down. It’s hard to interpret this, but centipedes show up throughout most of Burroughs’ writings as symbols of fear and anxiety. The dwarfs, being small men of slight stature, give birth to this symbol of fear possible meaning that it is the people of lesser value who unleash the most evil into the world.
By destroying these monstrous creatures, Kim is eliminating something that makes his world terrible. Furthermore, the incomprehensibility of the scenario illustrates what it feels like to live in a world where you can’t connect with others, and in fact wouldn’t want to, and feel nothing but alienation, disconnection, and confusion. It is a hostile and incomprehensible place. You can see why a gay heroin addict, and one who had difficulty even relating to other gay men, would feel a desire to destroy everything that creates the psychological oppression of dread, This is a sadistic, ultraviolent fantasy of a man who wants to live someplace where he can be left alone in peace. The extreme violence of Burroughs’ writing is like an artillery shield that protects a vulnerable man from everything that seeks to destroy him. If you read Burroughs carefully, he does express ideas of what it would be like to live in a peaceful and beautiful world. It is a world without persecution and one where everybody minds their own business.
Another baffling passage comes near the end when Kim, in the guise of a secret agent, gets assigned to visit the desert crater where the aforementioned space ship landed. It is secretly guarded by the American military because the last surviving ancestors of the missing link live there. They are the vectors that came between earlier primates and the human species, the vectors that contracted the virus that mutated into human language. Burroughs always had a thing for viruses and his hypothesis that viruses are used by entities from outer space to control humans is lifted directly from Scientology. Actually, if you think about it, language does bear a superficial similarity to a virus in that it survives and replicates by moving from host to host. It is through language that bad ideas spread throughout society, sometimes in the form of memes as Richard Dawkins defines them. A junky high on heroin can lie for days in bed without thinking a single thought. In the absence of language, they would be impermeable to any ideas bad or good. It would be like a womb of silence without any intrusions from words, similar to the way that the Johnson Gang lives on their private plot of land without any intrusions from the outside. This would be an appealing state to be in when confronted by a hostile and alien world that seeks to destroy you for no other purpose than that is what the world does. Life is a killer. Rub out the word. In any case, the primates in the crater let out a virus that spreads to the nearby military base and presumably beyond. How Burroughs got us from a farm in Missouri populated exclusively by gay outlaws to a crater in the desert populated by the missing link is far from clear. But that’s just the way William S. Burroughs rolls.
These are the easiest themes to digest in this novel. There are so many others that it would be impossible to interpret all of it. You don’t have to pursue every element that enters into the story though; in a Joycean sense, you can only grasp on to whatever you can and let everything else flow by especially when everything else is as appealing as vomit and raw sewage. In fact, the worst part of this book is that it is so jam packed (fudge packed?) with information that you might feel exhausted before getting to the end. But what a wild ride it is.
Burroughs’ final novels deserve some reconsideration. If the lack of traditional literary formulas frustrated you when reading his earlier works, The Place of Dead Roads might be a good place to pick up Burroughs again. It is more structured and fine tuned without losing any of the transgressive qualities that made his writing so notorious to begin with. Maybe readers in the 1980s weren’t ready for this kind of book. Maybe they still aren’t. Maybe someday the human race will catch up to this genius writer. Maybe by then everybody will have learned to mind their own business. We aren’t there yet.
William S. Burroughs always defied categories. Whether he could be classified as a Beat Generation or a science-fiction author can be infinitely debatable. Burroughs would have advised you to not waste time on such distinctions since categories are arbitrary by nature. But you can’t deny that, up to a certain point, this novel is a western. But, just as much, it is a science-fiction novel although nobody else has ever written science-fiction the way Burroughs did. In fact no one else every wrote a western the way he did either. But neither of these categories hold since it could just as well be a work of surrealism, romanticism, pulp crime, gay fictions, utopianism, dystopianism, postmodernism, or anything else you could possibly think of. Burroughs is just a category unto himself.
But true to his own style, his 1980s novels defy his own niche that he created in the earlier years of his writing. Most of his earlier works had no plot or character development. They were mostly series of dream sequences and vignettes with characters that extended no further than what they did in each scene. On the other hand, in The Place of Dead Roads there is both plot and character development. This is definitely new territory for this most unconventional of all unconventional authors.
Kim Carsons is a young man who inherits a plot of rural land after his parents die. When arriving in the nearest town, he buys an arsenal of guns which get excessively described in pornographic detail. The eroticism of guns is firmly established early in the story. Kim brings another boy to his rustic cabin and the two look over his guns before having sex. Soon after, Kim goes out to the woods, sets up targets, and begins shooting. While doing so, a faun appears and then they have sex. But the sex is a kind of foreplay for gun shooting which they do in between bouts of intercourse.
Kim begins to attract a group of followers, all male and gay. They indulge freely in carnal pleasures and have gun fights with those who don’t respect them, primarily homophobic bullies and Christians who won’t leave them alone. They also practice sex magic rituals in which ejaculations function like guns, shooting psychically charged deadly venom at their visualized enemies, killing them from a distance without leaving a trace of evidence. The boys quickly gain a reputation for being outlaws and expert shootists who should never be messed with. They dub themselves the Johnson Gang and live by an ethos of everyone minding their own business. This means they demand the freedom to live close to nature, far from the modern world of technology, where they can indulge in sex and drugs. Anybody who intrudes on them has basically signed their own death certificate. The descriptions are explicit and brutal; Burroughs writes about violence with as much passion as he writes about guns and sex. To the chagrin of most feminists, this novel is a celebration of phallo-centrism to an extreme and the vision is one of a masculine society free from the presence of women. Burroughs doesn’t express any animosity towards women. It’s just that they barely exist in the world he writes about.
One interesting passage near the beginning, when Burroughs describes Kim’s childhood and relationship with his artist father, involves the boy writing a science-fiction story and submitting it to Boy’s Life magazine for publication. The story is about some half-human/half-giant insect creatures on a search and destroy mission in a jungle river gorge on Venus. (This passage seems to parallel a chapter in Cities Of the Red Night where the pirates invade Panama City) This bizarre story is so far from anything that would ever be published in the vanilla teenage magazine that it serves to illustrate how distant Kim feels from boring, mainstream America at the onset of his adolescence. Incidentally, Kim travels to Venus in some later chapters of this novel.
Later on, Kim leaves his rural property and travels around America, sometimes with the Johnson Gang and sometimes without them. He liaises with various members of an underground network of gay criminals. Sometimes he is involved with hit jobs on the Mafia. The already thin plot begins to wear even thinner. But then we hear from a visitor from outer space whose space ship crash landed in the desert and released a virus into the world. This takes on significance later.
Meanwhile, Kim travels to Europe and begins working as a secret agent, taking on different identities as he goes along. If you think you can read any Burroughs novel without getting thoroughly confused at some point, you are wrong. It becomes hard to tell when Kim is Kim acting under an assumed identity and when a character isn’t Kim at all. Watching him change personas is like watching a blackjack dealer shuffle a deck of cards; you can briefly see what each card is but they go by so fast they all blur together. Even more disorienting is the way Kim can be at a dinner party with spies in France one minutes, then he opens a door and comes out as someone different in Morocco. Any sense of linearity or stability of character disappears. We get led around the world to Burroughs’ favorite haunts like Ecuador, Colombia, London, Paris, and Tangier. Kim shoots up heroin and methadone, visits exotic weapons dealers in North African bazaars, receives coded messages from secret agents in Gibraltar, and goes to a high level drug dealer’s party and gets seduced by a woman who changes sexes. All the while he’s probably some kind of secret agent being contacted by entities in outer space. Who knows what it all amounts to, but the hallucinatory nature of it all makes you question if Burroughs is expressing the feeling of shifting in and out of altered states of consciousness while using drugs.
The most baffling passage is when Kim is living on Venus with his boyfriend. The two live together in a cabin that is described as being similar to the cabin he inhabits in Missouri at the beginning of the novel. This kind of overlapping is a key feature in many of Burroughs’ writings. He leaves to walk around a tourist resort which he at first says is in Egypt, but as he goes away, unauthorized, from the designated resort, he wanders into a nightmarish world where he finds houses full of dwarfs. Centipedes are emerging from the dwarfs’ heads and shedding them as if the little men are cocoons for the monster insects. Kim can do nothing but shoot them and burn the place down. It’s hard to interpret this, but centipedes show up throughout most of Burroughs’ writings as symbols of fear and anxiety. The dwarfs, being small men of slight stature, give birth to this symbol of fear possible meaning that it is the people of lesser value who unleash the most evil into the world.
By destroying these monstrous creatures, Kim is eliminating something that makes his world terrible. Furthermore, the incomprehensibility of the scenario illustrates what it feels like to live in a world where you can’t connect with others, and in fact wouldn’t want to, and feel nothing but alienation, disconnection, and confusion. It is a hostile and incomprehensible place. You can see why a gay heroin addict, and one who had difficulty even relating to other gay men, would feel a desire to destroy everything that creates the psychological oppression of dread, This is a sadistic, ultraviolent fantasy of a man who wants to live someplace where he can be left alone in peace. The extreme violence of Burroughs’ writing is like an artillery shield that protects a vulnerable man from everything that seeks to destroy him. If you read Burroughs carefully, he does express ideas of what it would be like to live in a peaceful and beautiful world. It is a world without persecution and one where everybody minds their own business.
Another baffling passage comes near the end when Kim, in the guise of a secret agent, gets assigned to visit the desert crater where the aforementioned space ship landed. It is secretly guarded by the American military because the last surviving ancestors of the missing link live there. They are the vectors that came between earlier primates and the human species, the vectors that contracted the virus that mutated into human language. Burroughs always had a thing for viruses and his hypothesis that viruses are used by entities from outer space to control humans is lifted directly from Scientology. Actually, if you think about it, language does bear a superficial similarity to a virus in that it survives and replicates by moving from host to host. It is through language that bad ideas spread throughout society, sometimes in the form of memes as Richard Dawkins defines them. A junky high on heroin can lie for days in bed without thinking a single thought. In the absence of language, they would be impermeable to any ideas bad or good. It would be like a womb of silence without any intrusions from words, similar to the way that the Johnson Gang lives on their private plot of land without any intrusions from the outside. This would be an appealing state to be in when confronted by a hostile and alien world that seeks to destroy you for no other purpose than that is what the world does. Life is a killer. Rub out the word. In any case, the primates in the crater let out a virus that spreads to the nearby military base and presumably beyond. How Burroughs got us from a farm in Missouri populated exclusively by gay outlaws to a crater in the desert populated by the missing link is far from clear. But that’s just the way William S. Burroughs rolls.
These are the easiest themes to digest in this novel. There are so many others that it would be impossible to interpret all of it. You don’t have to pursue every element that enters into the story though; in a Joycean sense, you can only grasp on to whatever you can and let everything else flow by especially when everything else is as appealing as vomit and raw sewage. In fact, the worst part of this book is that it is so jam packed (fudge packed?) with information that you might feel exhausted before getting to the end. But what a wild ride it is.
Burroughs’ final novels deserve some reconsideration. If the lack of traditional literary formulas frustrated you when reading his earlier works, The Place of Dead Roads might be a good place to pick up Burroughs again. It is more structured and fine tuned without losing any of the transgressive qualities that made his writing so notorious to begin with. Maybe readers in the 1980s weren’t ready for this kind of book. Maybe they still aren’t. Maybe someday the human race will catch up to this genius writer. Maybe by then everybody will have learned to mind their own business. We aren’t there yet.
January 5, 2011
2nd in the trilogy and think i preferred this to Cities of the Red Night which was also pretty "For The Win". maybe i just got lucky and the focus on cowboy kim was a lot strong than the rebel captain stuff from Cities, wish i read it more recently, but will mos def be cappin the trilogy after this... gay alien cowboy asassins are really really really really really cool
----
They capture hyenas and blind them with red-hot needles and burn out their vocal cords while they intone certain spells binding the tortured animals to their will, twisting their own eyes into the quivering pain socket, they lead blind mouths to the target, pouring the mindless ferocity of their crocodile brains into the hyena's terrible bone-cracking jaws to fashion a silent dedicated instrument of death.
Kim, if you had your choice, would you rather be a poisonous snake or a nonpoisonous snake?
Poisonous sir, like a green mamba or a spitting cobra.
Why?
I'd feel safer, sir.
And that's your idea of heaven, feeling safer?
Yes sir.
Is a poisonous snake really safer?
Not really in the long run, but who cares about that? He must feel real good after he bites someone.
Safer?
Yes sir. Dead people are less frightening than live ones. It's a step in the right direction.
Young man, I think you're an assassin.
Tom wants to re-create various erotic incidents from Kim's past life. ...
"Well me and my Fox Boy made sex maginc against old Judge Farris. ... He said I look like a sheep-killing dog and his horrible wife said I am a walking corpse. ... You can be the Fox Boy. ..."
The set for this scene was a room in the old brothel with a worn green satin sofa and an erotic Japanese screen with flying pricks and an old man chasing them with butterfly nets. Kim finds it tasteful.
"Can I pet the skull?"
"Certainly. You all can."
"Here lies three bad dogs which eated the bag offen a cow and had to be shat."
I adore dirigibles. It's like floating along in a gigantic erection.
----
They capture hyenas and blind them with red-hot needles and burn out their vocal cords while they intone certain spells binding the tortured animals to their will, twisting their own eyes into the quivering pain socket, they lead blind mouths to the target, pouring the mindless ferocity of their crocodile brains into the hyena's terrible bone-cracking jaws to fashion a silent dedicated instrument of death.
Kim, if you had your choice, would you rather be a poisonous snake or a nonpoisonous snake?
Poisonous sir, like a green mamba or a spitting cobra.
Why?
I'd feel safer, sir.
And that's your idea of heaven, feeling safer?
Yes sir.
Is a poisonous snake really safer?
Not really in the long run, but who cares about that? He must feel real good after he bites someone.
Safer?
Yes sir. Dead people are less frightening than live ones. It's a step in the right direction.
Young man, I think you're an assassin.
Tom wants to re-create various erotic incidents from Kim's past life. ...
"Well me and my Fox Boy made sex maginc against old Judge Farris. ... He said I look like a sheep-killing dog and his horrible wife said I am a walking corpse. ... You can be the Fox Boy. ..."
The set for this scene was a room in the old brothel with a worn green satin sofa and an erotic Japanese screen with flying pricks and an old man chasing them with butterfly nets. Kim finds it tasteful.
"Can I pet the skull?"
"Certainly. You all can."
"Here lies three bad dogs which eated the bag offen a cow and had to be shat."
I adore dirigibles. It's like floating along in a gigantic erection.
November 20, 2019
Lets sit down and read a good ol' fashioned boys story with old bill. Cowboys, venus, guns, penis, more guns, more penis, female monkeys that engulf their male lovers leaving only testicles inflating and deflating. Centipedes. YES. People getting shot a lot. Time hopping. Genres dropping through other genres like lead weights through paper. Unfounded criticisms of wonderful countries:
"England is like some striken beast too stupid to know it is dead. God Save the Queen and her fascist regime" (clearly a Sex Pistols reference)
Come to think of it a fair few quotes like that, that I was surprised to recognise from the wider culture, such as:
"Bring out your dead" (Monty Python)
"April is the cruelest month" (Eliot)
Makes me wonder what I missed from his other books.
Some pearls of Burrough-sian wisdom
"Life is an entanglement of lies to hide the basic mechanisms."
"Your hands and your eyes know a lot more about shootin' than you do. Just learn to stand out of the way" - I think this is about his process for writing, choosing to follow the flow of instinct and learned routine, like a musician jamming, no planning, no forethought.
Overall very good, very well written (nicely grammatically messed up) very enjoyable book. Not as mad as his earlier works. Possibly not as good as Cities of the Red Night though it was more than a decade ago when I read that, so I couldn't say for sure. One of those books where if you drift off and start thinking about other things, you will be incredibly confused when you refocus on it, as it could be a totally different setting. There's no real over-arching plot, no fixed setting even, few fixed characters aside from Kit Carsons. (Who was apparently a real wild west folk hero, no doubt nothing like Burrough's creation.)
This book would be completely tedious were it written by someone with less humour and less interest in violent and exciting things. Blood Meridian with a sense of humour is what I thought at first, before it spun out further and wilder, further and wilder.
"England is like some striken beast too stupid to know it is dead. God Save the Queen and her fascist regime" (clearly a Sex Pistols reference)
Come to think of it a fair few quotes like that, that I was surprised to recognise from the wider culture, such as:
"Bring out your dead" (Monty Python)
"April is the cruelest month" (Eliot)
Makes me wonder what I missed from his other books.
Some pearls of Burrough-sian wisdom
"Life is an entanglement of lies to hide the basic mechanisms."
"Your hands and your eyes know a lot more about shootin' than you do. Just learn to stand out of the way" - I think this is about his process for writing, choosing to follow the flow of instinct and learned routine, like a musician jamming, no planning, no forethought.
Overall very good, very well written (nicely grammatically messed up) very enjoyable book. Not as mad as his earlier works. Possibly not as good as Cities of the Red Night though it was more than a decade ago when I read that, so I couldn't say for sure. One of those books where if you drift off and start thinking about other things, you will be incredibly confused when you refocus on it, as it could be a totally different setting. There's no real over-arching plot, no fixed setting even, few fixed characters aside from Kit Carsons. (Who was apparently a real wild west folk hero, no doubt nothing like Burrough's creation.)
This book would be completely tedious were it written by someone with less humour and less interest in violent and exciting things. Blood Meridian with a sense of humour is what I thought at first, before it spun out further and wilder, further and wilder.
May 4, 2019
While often called the middle volume of a "Western Lands Trilogy", that designation only serves to locate this book within the span of Wm. S. Burroughs' writing career and, to a lesser extent, to acknowledge thematic ties to Cities of the Red Night and The Western Lands. In respect to narrative story, this is a stand-alone book, and can be read as such.
Here, Burroughs takes on and subverts the tropes of the classic Western, with his gunman anti-hero Kim Carsons setting out to make a life for himself on his own terms, defying the standards, morals and entrenched institutions of his day.
As with many Burroughs works, the narrative is not strictly sequential, and a coherent story only emerges gradually, persists briefly, and then is deconstructed into shards of possibility, impossibility, and speculative supposition as the protagonist succeeds in transcending the ordered consensus reality, to an uncertain end.
Those who flinch at explicit homosexual content should give it a miss, because Kim Carsons is an enthusiastic afficianado of buggery, and transgressive sexual themes permeate this book. One might be tempted to call such material gratuitous, and Burroughs is reputed to having said he included the raunchy bits to keep himself interested. But, on a deeper level, the contrarian nature of the protagonist's sexuality shows quite plainly why living within the established order of late 19th to early 20th Century America is an impossible proposition for him.
For all it's oddities, this book contains some of Burroughs' finest characterizations and evocative prose. And its non-hero hero is vivid and memorable.
Here, Burroughs takes on and subverts the tropes of the classic Western, with his gunman anti-hero Kim Carsons setting out to make a life for himself on his own terms, defying the standards, morals and entrenched institutions of his day.
As with many Burroughs works, the narrative is not strictly sequential, and a coherent story only emerges gradually, persists briefly, and then is deconstructed into shards of possibility, impossibility, and speculative supposition as the protagonist succeeds in transcending the ordered consensus reality, to an uncertain end.
Those who flinch at explicit homosexual content should give it a miss, because Kim Carsons is an enthusiastic afficianado of buggery, and transgressive sexual themes permeate this book. One might be tempted to call such material gratuitous, and Burroughs is reputed to having said he included the raunchy bits to keep himself interested. But, on a deeper level, the contrarian nature of the protagonist's sexuality shows quite plainly why living within the established order of late 19th to early 20th Century America is an impossible proposition for him.
For all it's oddities, this book contains some of Burroughs' finest characterizations and evocative prose. And its non-hero hero is vivid and memorable.
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