THE PLACE OF DEAD ROADS - WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Burroughs is really a fool for this one. This is the second volume in his final, all-over-the-place trilogy that begins with CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT and concludes with THE WESTERN LANDS. I would say that I would not know these were a trilogy if someone had mentioned this online, it shares some thematic elements with COTRN but no character or settings and the thematic elements are the things present in all of the Burroughs oeuvre. An obsession with language being a virus and evil, weapons, especially guns, drugs, sex, conspiracy, it’s all here. The book centers around perhaps the most ur-Burroughs of characters, a Western gunfighter named Kim Carsons, who goes around the old west killing people and having gay sex, mostly with MENA boys. Eventually he forms a gang, called the Johnson Family, that assassinate and kill to advance a somewhat vague notion of freedom, against a shadowy group of controllers, called the Immortality Control Board of Venus (which I read as part of Burroughs’ famous misogyny) who are attempting to prevent humans from becoming free and immortal by reaching the Western Lands (which is the name of the final book in this trilogy, which I will read in a bit for sure). The book is, again in classic Burroughs fashion, non-linear and mostly a collection of scenes or “routine,” to use his word, which he seems to have strung together, somewhat as an after-though. Eventually, Carson goes into space and meets the Venusians and learns all about space-poisons and visits enormous weapons markets, has sex with all sorts of folks and other very Burroughs things. As always, the routines vary in quality, I would say overall, I liked this book less than COTRN, it just didn’t hit the same highs to me. I’m still looking forward to reading the last book in this series but the trilogy overall really is Burroughs distilled down to his sharpest elements and main obsessions. Here is a man who spent his whole life and professional career obsessed and thinking about the same things, sharpening his style and producing variations of the same thing. 83 dead roads