Superb. I have long been a devotee of the prose of William Burroughs. This is perhaps his best novel and also one of his most accessible works. There are passages near the end that are more reminiscent of The Soft Machine in which the gestures of language and the images they contain or express have been fractured and reassembled in odd and confusing ways. But those passages are incidental to the main thrust of the text and are wholly framed by it, and the main text is mostly clear, extremely wel...

Five stars for the first two hundred pages. After that, not so good.I really loved this book in high school. Not anymore. I cannot handle non-linear books right now.The first two hundred pages uses a dual narrative with the occasional chapter related to a virus. One story is about a pirate utopia while the other is about a private detective. I liked them both a lot. It was nice to read Burroughs using a hardboiled style with a detective. After about two hundred pages, the stories collapse. Burro...

''Others, completely naked despite the cold, had smooth reptilian skins, crystal disk eyes and long flexible tails tipped with points of translucent pink crystal.''Reincarnation as immortality. Past life regression as invasion of the body. Past life regression as resurrection. Past life regression as sex. Chop their heads off, hang the bodies. Cut them together, stitch them apart. Blend the souls and make a new man. A body made of two men, a synthesis of souls. Make sure the souls are of equal s...

Extremely strange with loads of extraneous jabber tossed into the mix about naked boys, rectal mucus, and the like. The narrative wasn't terrible but it bounced around so much it was nearly impossible to follow. Some of Burroughs's more autobiographical stuff is phenomenal (i.e. Junky & Queer). But this opener to a series is just too jumbled to be great.

A Warning of the Faustian Decline to Come........and it has already started. I'm not sure why but this was a really enjoyable book to read over the summer. (Read this during the summer of 2011)Many criticisms have been levelled at this book. However, I feel the reviewer of December 2, 2005 on amazon.com in particular has hit the nail on the head. It is not easy reading and is definitely not for the faint-hearted or prudish. As the above reviewer points out, this trilogy is for thinking people an...

Cities of the Red Night follows a dual narrative, slipping fluidly between the early 18th century exploits of a libertarian pirate crew, led by gunsmith Noah Blake, and the late 20th century “private asshole” (Clem Snide) hired to find the decapitated remains of one Jerry Green -- victim apparent of a bizarre hanging/sex cult. It is worth noting that hanging and the spontaneous erections/ejaculations induced by this mode of execution factor heavily into both tales, at times serving as the litera...

"To all the scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested….NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.”Reading William S. Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night is like experiencing a fevered dream or trance where one event runs into the next without rhyme or reason. Ostensibly, it is about a strange and deadly epidemic that is running rampant through the 'cities of the red night.' It is also about finding a missing person and then investigating his mur...

I loved Cities of the Red Night, as well as the Red Night trilogy as a whole. I have been through the trilogy twice now, and plan on reading them all at least one more time. When discussing literature with friends, I always tell them I think Bill Burroughs should be ranked up there with the greatest of American writers and that, if it weren't for the level of homophobia in this country, he would be considered the American James Joyce. I was an honors student in a university English program, and

So this is a book about jizz I guess? Starts with some really cool settings and interesting ideas but then just sorta devolves into erotic gibberish for the last 200 pages.

WSB doing bathhouse steampunk: a cut-up tale of boys, pirates and cowboys, queens, ejaculating weapons and wangs, private dicks and drugs all set in cities, deserts and jungles situated at various point in time and reality. There isn't much in the way of character development, most of the players are adolescent in form (as well as sexuality). Theatrical throughout to the point of sometimes becoming a gay burlesque within a gay burlesque. Regardless the chemical additives running in his veins, Mr...

Whoa! What a ride!!

I read this novel in 1991, and am currently rereading it.It is unbelievably brilliant and prescient.Burroughs wrote it in 1981, when AIDS was still unknownbut the virus was already spreading.In the air, so to speak.Given our current pandemic and the coronavirus's current mutations,sitting down with this piece of fiction againis sure to prove umunsettling. Maybe even delirious-making.It turned out AIDS was a zoonotic virus.Just as this "novel" coronavirus is...."The whole quality of human conscio...

An amazing roller-coaster ride through the unconscious. The main plot lines (a pirate story, a detective story, a sci fi/fantasy story) run parallel at first, but frustrate any hopes of proceeding in a straightforward fashion - they get more and more confused, hazy, and collapse into one another, until eventually you have no idea what you're reading. But this is misdirection, and here lies Burroughs' genius: even as you try to make sense of the inexplicable, he is painting in your peripheral vis...

Surprisingly less descriptions of anal mucus that I expected based on everyone else comments.

Father: What you reading? Cbj: This book by Burroughs. Father: Haven't read any Burroughs yet, he looks boring. I hate pretentious twats.Cbj: I liked Junkie. Now reading one called Cities of the Red Night. Can't seem to get into it. Yes, pretentious is the word. No character development. Characters introduced and then never appear again. About a bunch of pirates and then a murder investigation into some bizarre cult. Burroughs himself is like a cult leader who only wants a certain kind of esoter...

There are times when you know something is probably good and you know others think its probably good and for some reason, you should probably read that something but no matter how many times you try, you just can’t ever get over the mind-fuck that ensues. And yes, there are good mind-fucks but sometimes, there are also bad mind-fucks. This one is a terrible mind-fuck. The premise is awesome: lots of people are dying because of an epidemic/plague/what-have-you and some queer stuff takes place (it...

well that was disturbingly dark

Virus 23 is a virulent and fatal disease which causes sexual frenzies and violent death, threatening to break out into a pandemic. The virus has been latent since pre-history, before the existence of white-skinned peoples, caused by a meteorite / black hole incident in the Gobi Desert, where peaceful townships suffered mutations when the radiation triggered the virus and turned paradise into The Cities of the Red Night.Burroughs, in an uncharacteristically coherent vein, adopts (mostly) linear t...

AIDS-era Burroughs tale of a killer virus, pirate shenanigans and boys doing what boys do best(guess). After re-reading it I kicked it up one star to four because it reminded me of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Dusan Makavejev movies from the early Seventies. If you liked Holy Mountain or Sweet Movie you'll like this. The plot is a dog's breakfast but I'd read it in small spurts, yes spurts - we need to use that word in a Burroughs review.

Had trouble connecting with this one. Constantly felt as if there was an opaque overlay over each page, handicapping me.