Red cities

It's so strange to me that people prefer Naked Lunch to the other W. S. Burroughs novels; Naked Lunch is completely disgusting, whereas the trilogy of novels in Cities of the Red Night is only partially disgusting. And where it's not disgusting, it's imaginative and full of ideas which, under-appreciated as they are, any fantasy, sci-fi, or magical realist author should steal from. The first of the three books, Cities, is too straight-forward to be very inspiring, but it's also enough like a novel that it can segue the average reader into the second book, The Place of Dead Roads, which is almost a (Weird-) Western, featuring striking caricatures like The Priest, an outlaw who enters gun-fights intoning the Last Rites for his enemies, whom he's about to kill. There are others whose techniques are too upsetting to repeat right here, but they all seem like cameo guest-appearances from a folklore that doesn't exist, but would have been invented if we were a more creative species than we are. And the final book, The Western Lands, gives you a Sergio Leone-does-Ancient Egypt experience... or rather, it implies such an experience, but seems to consist only of the explanatory footnotes. It's almost like he's showing us what novels ought to have been, if we'd been strong enough to make them. He wasn't quite strong enough either to make these books -- because they're books about books that never quite made it from his mind into the world. He does explain, not only what they would have been, but all the secret and hidden meanings that would have been encoded into them. They're so full of thrilling ideas... I only read this trilogy because I needed to understand some of the occult-inflected imagery of "red desert" and "red cities" as they appear in other materials, and since such a place is more a vision than a formed idea, Burroughs commentary-like novels were pretty much perfect. 

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