The Place of Dead Roads - Softcover

‘It’s a comedy and a nightmare of Bosch-like visions, extraordinarily precise vivid visualisations, outrageous ideas like mind bombs.’ Allen Ginsberg

'"The Place of Dead Roads" is Burroughs at his very best, with the same remarkable ear for dialogue and effortless originality.' Guardian

‘The most radical innovator in fiction since Joyce.’ Angela Carter

‘Burroughs has a paranoid vision, but as he himself said: the psychotic is someone who knows what’s really going on.’ J. G. Ballard, Sunday Times

A controversial reworking of well-trodden American myth by the author of ‘Naked Lunch’.

This surreal fable, set in America’s Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America.

Fantastical and humorous, ‘The Place of Dead Roads’ continues William Burroughs’ exploration of society’s controlling forces – the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs – with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.