Tag: cut-up

I’ve read a handful of Burroughs novels and also Casey Rae’s entertaining and informative William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n Roll. I think this is easily my favorite novel by the Beat icon. It is ridiculous, absurd, wholly pointless, unrepentently filthy, and a great deal of fun.

In Casey Rae’s examination of Burroughs I learned about his “cut-up” method of creation, splicing and collaging multiple texts and ideas together from disparate sources to forge something new. Cities of the Red Night samples deep cuts from across the 20th century: we get Crowley sex magic, pulp noir and sci-fi and horror, Mexican archaeology, chasms of time and ancient gods and civilizations borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft, political chicanary and revolutionary rhetoric, lots of guns and cannons and far-out weaponry, drugs, viruses, and oodles of hot gay sex featuring an asphyxiation fetish.

What is the novel about? Well, there is a doctor fighting a viral outbreak, and then a private dick investigating the disappearance of a young lad whose head ends up in a crate bound for Peru, a pirate revolution in Colombia and Panama, a war between humans and mutants in ancient vanished cities, conspiring conspirators doing conspiracies…it’s about so much it’s practically about nothing. Some of the characters shift from modern era New York to thousands of years ago and then to the jungles of 18th century South America before suddenly getting onto a starship in the distant future. At one point a main character wakes up in a rehab clinic and it appears the entire novel was a hallucination; but it might actually be that he could access actual reality in his comatose state and he’s only waking up into the shared illusion we call reality.

I mean it doesn’t matter what it means or if it means anything at all. Enjoy the ride!

I will note that I’ve likely read a couple thousand novels, and that this one has more ejaculations than all of the other novels I’ve read combined. And that includes a couple long books by the Marquis de Sade, so it’s an impressive number of money shots. So the novel could perhaps be classed as a sort of cartoonish pornography. Keep that in mind if you choose to read it.