The Place of Dead Roads (1984)

I didn't understand this book. I didn't really see the point of it. I couldn't really follow it. To be honest, I bought it because I liked the cover. It's a very cool cover.

Admit it.

William Burroughs's novel, The Place of Dead Roads, begins as a satire of the classic American western gunslinger. The hero is a young man with a gun. He comes into town and very quickly forms a gang made up of other young men who all want to sleep with him.

Well, not sleep.

In fact, nearly all of the men our hero meets want to sleep with him. Most of them do.

For all of the sex our hero has in the first half of The Place of Dead Roads there's not much writing about sex in the book. Mr. Burroughs just states that so-and-so slept with the hero and moves on with his story. He saves his more flowery prose for descriptions of guns. There are lots of guns in The Place of Dead Roads. Guns described in ways I expect sex is described in 50 Shades of Gray. I've not read 50 Shades of Gray so I'm guessing here, but I imagine that the sex in 50 Shades of Gray is described in ways that are meant to be erotic but not in ways that go so far as to offend too many people. Real, but not that real. That's about how Mr. Burroughs describes the guns in The Place of Dead Roads.

That's probably part of the satire, that the guns are described like sex while the sex is not described at all.

About half way through The Place of Dead Roads the hero goes into the future and travels into space.

That's where Mr. Burroughs really lost me, but I think the rest of the book takes place on Venus.

There's not nearly as much sex in the second half of the book, which was kind of a let down, oddly. There aren't as many guns either.

I remember reading somewhere that Mr. Burroughs once took a manuscript, cut it into pieces and then rearranged those pieces more-or-less randomly to produce a new manuscript which he then published. By the end of The Place of Dead Roads I was beginning to wonder if something similar was going on. Mr. Burrough's writing is excellent. Judging his work on a sentence by sentence basis, even a page by page basis, I have to say that he is a wonderful writer. However, looking at the novel as a whole, I have to say that by the end of The Place of Dead Roads I remembered why I stopped reading William Burroughs two decades ago. ( )