The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead By William S. Burroughs
The Wild Boys is a futuristic tale of global warfare in which a guerrilla gang of boys dedicated to freedom battles the organized armies of repressive police states. Making full use of his inimitable humor, wild imagination, and style, Burroughs creates a world that is as terrifying as it is fascinating. The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead
Characters The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead
The phrase 'rectal mucus' appears no less than four times in this 152-page book. Just in case anyone was wondering. Are the rest of his books like this? Asking because if so I won't be reading them. 9780802133311 So I'd been wanting to read something by William S. Burroughs for a while because his name hold such gravitas in my mind... but his writing... well... its pornographic and I nearly didn't finish the book. Definitely would not recommend. Just because something is provocative does not mean that it is worth reading. 9780802133311 I had never seen this cover, but it’s hilarious! My vision of futuristic dystopian youth gangs doesn’t look so 1950s wholesome—but I can only guess what Burroughs had in mind.
I prefer his late trilogy and his early work, but The Wild Boys is dark and satirical, and not too cut-up, like the mid-career Nova Express trilogy. 9780802133311 William S Burroughs does not like women or at least he did not like his distopian fantasies to contain any flattering versions of them. I would not expect a man who shot his wife in the head accidentally while trying to shoot a shot glass off her head (while wasted I might add) to have any use for women (although it is said that he was deeply sorry and remorseful for having accidentally murdered his wife.) He even says so in his wild distopian world where women are eventually used as surrogates to make more wild boys and they have no need to even come remotely in contact with any awful women creatures from the time they are born. That being said I still enjoy Burroughs' writing. It is engaging and creative and perverse in a way that only Burroughs can be. This book is filled with pages and pages of raw sweaty gay male sex (but is not without its own sensitivities), war, violence, decadence and drug references. This is why I love Burroughs he just said things in a way no one else does and the fact that he does not want any women in his distopian fantasy world filled with young men who are filled with an isatiable lust for each other and a lust for violence really does not bother me one bit. This is his fantasy world not mine and I am glad he wrote it down so I could get a glimpse into it. We need books like this. Books that scare and disgust people but at the same open your mind to a new way of thinking and writing. 9780802133311 That’s a Burroughs novel alright. I could list some adjectives right now to give you a sense of what I mean by that exactly. Simply put: this novel is twisted, crazy, fucked-up, weird, sexually explicit, extreme, simultaneously unreadable and entertaining, funny, disturbing, raw, wild, satirical, avant-garde, surreal, and plenty more.
Burroughs’s unconventional semi-dystopian vision is repetitive and occasionally vaguely annoying, but it’s also filled to the brim with brilliance and state-of-the-art mindfuckery, leading the reader down a pit of unfiltered insanity. Alongside its political satire, literary experimentation, and rebellious spirit are sometimes gross and always explicit descriptions of hardcore homoerotic sexual fantasies that delve into the most bizarre corners of human sexuality and intermingle with surrealistic imagery and the implementation of Burroughs’s famous “cut-up” style, making these strange, fascinating fantasies all the more dizzying to read. Being rather used to heavily bizarre and explicit sexual content in literature (in large part thanks to the other Burroughs works I have read), not much in The Wild Boys truly shocked me; however, this numbness to the content’s shock value did not stop the memorability and insanity of these sequences from having an impact. Getting a glimpse inside the perverted and ingenious mind of William S. Burroughs is always a treat, overtly shocking or not, and this novel does not disappoint. It manages to mix surprisingly linear and plot-oriented chapters with sections of confusing, dreamlike madness with little sense beyond sexual desire or drug induced creativity driving them. It’s not his masterpiece, but it is a worthy entry in his bibliography that is a must-read for those who are as in love with experimental and transgressive fiction as I am. 9780802133311
Anybody that likes William S. Burroughs only says that because they want to sound like they can comprehend what in the hell he's talking about when NO ONE actually can. Or they just saw the Naked Lunch movie and thought that talking beetle type-writers are cool. 9780802133311 Sir, we've been overrun by clawed pubescent urchins, requesting backup. Choppy, anarchic, gleefully pornographic, confrontationally off-putting. Yet satirical, clever, kinetically experimental, serially engaging in spite of itself. And completely caught up in its own desires to denial of any other readerly needs, which has its merits, even if the stuttering stop-start-repeat of the images here has a decidedly masturbatory (quite literally) aspect and associated outside boredome. With some of the play with viewpoint and camera here (the roving pan shot, the peepholes that unify disparate material) this has a Robbe-Grilletian aspect, but with a direct gay gaze that still seems daring only a decade after the censorship of Naked Lunch. For all of this, and despite the Problems in evidence throughout the weird cultural artifact that is Burroughs, this might be his best. 9780802133311 I was relatively innocent when I read The Wild Boys and it gave me nightmares. The staccato, choppy plot is too disjointed to ever really allow anything to come to a close so the images tend to remain in some vestibule of the brain and come spilling out at night when your poor consciousness tries to form them into some kind of completeness.
The images themselves are sometimes gruesome and you can almost sense Burroughs' lunatic energy and all his wild imaginings spilling out on the page and being herded-somewhat unsuccessfully- into the form of a novel. Some people will have trouble with the homosexual imagery, but almost everyone will be haunted to some extent by the casual eroticization of death and cruelty-I think the Mayan sequences are some of the most persistent.
But this is not mere incoherent pornography, there is a wild, energetic beauty and an almost religious devotion to wontonly intense experience that is-along with WSB's poetic style-unforgettable.
Lynn Hoffman, author of the much-less disturbing bang BANG: A Novel and the downright soothing New Short Course in Wine,The 9780802133311 I learned that reading Burroughs on the bus makes me feel incredibly filthy and awkward from this book. It could be all the allusions to the smell of rectal mucus, or maybe I'm just weird. 9780802133311 Oh Billy boy, what a merry dance you lead.
It's ages since I last read any Burroughs, and even longer since I last read any Burroughs for the first time. It may seem odd that I hadn't read this before – it's one of his most celebrated, after all – but Cities Of The Red Night is such sublime perfection that I tend to keep helplessly rereading it rather than reach for anything else.
And in fact it did take me a while to get into this one. Whether the problem was with the opening chapters themselves or with my pop-lit-softened brain, I can't rightly say. But as yet another beautiful boy fondled yet another sweaty jockstrap for the 23rd time, I found myself thinking: Oh come on, this is Burroughs-by-numbers, what a yawn.
Until... BOOM, up and away it took flight.
Souvenir post cards a violet evening sky rising from the boy's groin ... sad 1920 scraps ... dim jerky faraway stars splash the stagnant creek ... I was waiting there ... held a little-boy photo in his withered hand ... The boy was footsteps down the windy street a long time ago.
Read it and weep. It's that combination of utter abandon and utter control that I find so mysterious and compelling. A devastated psyche, but an immaculate technique. How in hell did he do it?
Well, one way he did it was by drawing inspiration from The Tibetan Book Of The Dead (this novel's full title is The Wild Boys: A Book Of The Dead). Just to be clear, though: the inspiration was literary, not spiritual. Despite his association with the Naropa Institute, Burroughs (according to Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs) didn't actually give two hoots about Buddhism, except insofar as he could use its facilities – and in this case, its masterpieces – for his own ends. If I remember rightly, it was Gysin who introduced Burroughs to The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, and Gysin's own interest in it was more authentically spiritual, resulting in the textual sprawl that ultimately became The Last Museum (which I reviewed here)... but I digress.
Long story short: Burroughs was a stone cold genius, damn his eyes. 9780802133311