I bought The Last Words of Dutch Schultz immediately after reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. I was expecting something a bit more esoteric for that reason -- in Shea and Wilson's book, Dutch's last words contain occult information of a sort very different from that in Burroughs' book. Shea and Wilson weave together Lovecraftian topics and beatnik fiction to create a fascinating hybrid.

Nevertheless, Burroughs' book is interesting in its own right. Writing as a film script is jarring to the reader, much like Burroughs' cut-up writing style. Burroughs underlines Dutch's ravings, made to a stenographer in the hospital as he lay dying, with his vision of 1930's mafia life. It's a dark, grungy book, well written, though at first difficult to get into. Certainly not what I had expected. ( )