Nick Perzacki’s Reviews > Naked Lunch > Status Update

I know this whole book is Burroughs’ heroin fueled ramblings, but this chapter (ordinary men and women) truly felt like he was slipping in and out of consciousness the entire time - the peak of the chapter was definitely the story about the man who taught his asshole to talk, leading his asshole to demand equal rights.

TW: Never seen “Wheeeee!” screamed during sex as much as here. Burroughs proves in AJ’s Annual Party that he can write sex in a pleasantly evocative manner when he wants to, right before it devolves into cumming blood, necrophilia, and rape. The next chapter with the doctor presenting a “deanxietized man” and the patient just turns into a giant centipede to the horror of everyone observing was pretty funny.

I feel like every update on this book needs a TW: I’m a little confused by the Mugwumps, because earlier I was told their dicks are basically fountains of youth, but I literally just read about one raping a boy to death (I think? It’s hard to tell sometimes with this book). This was just the pre-amble to a crazy gay orgy, attacked by a horde of women who were then chopped down by a pirate. Idk what that was about

When the character descends into a drug trip, I too have absolutely no fucking idea what is happening usually. Dr. Benway made another appearance, this time in a nightmare - to revive a woman who OD’d he used a toilet plunger on an open chest cavity… it didn’t work. Another nightmare included a woman singing the national anthem so loud it literally incinerated a man and made another’s brain hemorrhage.

Dr. Benway is a fucking menace. I know this is an absurdist world, but to keep a “perfected society” bro is planting Vaseline in suspected-gay men’s assholes and torturing subjects by electric shocking them into a pool of freezing water when they get a boner in their sleep. The riot that breaks out in this society is also absolutely horrific, I should’ve saved this book for Halloween season.

Next time I have a bad high I’m going to leap out of my seat and scream “I’ve got the fear!”
Other banger quotes include:“Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding a stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey”; “Everything indicates that you have, in some unspeakable manner uh… assimilated the District Supervisor. Unfortunately there is no proof.”

After having read Junky by Burroughs, I can immediately feel the similarities, but also can tell this will be a far more surreal and disturbing book. The language is so evocative, and has already been full of some pretty disturbing/disgusting imagery just in the first two chapters (especially “The Vigilante”)