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The Red Night Trilogy #2
The Place of Dead Roads
A good old-fashioned shoot-out in the American West of the frontier days serves as the springboard for this hyperkinetic adventure in which gunslingers, led by Kim Carson, fight for galactic freedom. The Place of Dead Roads is the second novel in the trilogy with Cities of the Red Night and The Western Lands.
306 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
About the author
William S. Burroughs
339 books6,110 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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Displaying 1 - 30 of 157 reviews
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.
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.
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.
June 9, 2014
This book is real. These are real characters and their abilities to cope with the real world. Some of the best language I've read from Burroughs. This book has everything I ever wanted in a novel. Masterpiece.
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.
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.
Shelved as '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.
October 20, 2019
Nosleep
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.
December 6, 2016
If The first book of this trilogy starts in more or less normal way and slowly slips into the madness, The Place of Dead Roads begins with the developed mild schizophrenia and very soon the set is left with no reasonable logic and this is what amazes me so in this book... no rules, no controls - just pure flow of creativity, something like free jazz. and to stick with the analogy - if you don't know the standards - you cannot improvise.
But this is not an easy book to read - on the contrary. Somewhere in the middle, I decided to force myself to finish this one and strongly declined the idea to read the last book of the trilogy. BUT! I finished Place of Dead Roads yesterday and today i'm reading Western Lands.
But this is not an easy book to read - on the contrary. Somewhere in the middle, I decided to force myself to finish this one and strongly declined the idea to read the last book of the trilogy. BUT! I finished Place of Dead Roads yesterday and today i'm reading Western Lands.
February 25, 2014
First later Burroughs I've read and it was a pleasant surprise. He still leaves you to fill in some of the blanks but it is almost a through-narrative. That in itself doesn't make it better or worse, and ultimately it isn't as good as his best work, but it is now my favorite novel about a queer, time-traveling cowboy.
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