Rating: 
Summary: Somewhere on the threshold....
Review: At one time I thought Burroughs was a total fraud. It was my opinion that he was laughing all the way to the bank at the dupes who bought his books- and paid for his habit. Then I sat down and read this book, and _The Place of Dead Roads_, and The Western Lands. I was dead wrong. This is an unique and valid vision. This is modern art in print, designed to rip the mind free from its habitual sleep walking. And that is strange, for this is one prolonged nightmare, or bad trip.... yet, while I was reading this I got this sense of deja vu, like the Cities of the Red Night and a Place of Dead Roads actually exist-somewhere- perhaps on the threshholds of hell, or limbo, or.... even "heaven." Where ever it is, it is a place on the border where only dreams, drugs, or black magic can take you.
Moreover, I think I understand Burroughs place in the beat trilogy. Kerouac was the holy fool who had the capacity to touch on direct union with the Divine. Ginsberg, was the secular humanist, a good man well grounded in the world. Burroughs, however, walked the left hand path, the shadow. Taken together, all three, the holy trinity, were the composite soul of an age.
Rating:
Summary: ORGASM OF THE WORD
Review: Burroughs searches in his writing for the same thing he searched for in drug use, sex and the russian roulette games he played with his guns: to try and distill out of an experience the pure essence of what it means to be alive, that single moment of ecstasy when living is made real in a blinding flash. Through graphic imagery of sex and death Burroughs will play you like a miscreant attacking a cathedral pipe organ, pulling out all the stops, feet pounding all the pedals at once, hands stomping the keys, blasting the pipes. In that rush of noise he challenges you to find the whisper of truth. A Liturgy and Scripture for the Damned.
Rating: 
Summary: It's the End of the World...
Review: Burroughs' "Cities of the Red Night" is a feverish glimpse into alternate histories, the end of the world, new forms of government, viral mutations, bizarre slants on ethnicity and the to-be-expected preoccupation with hard drugs and wild sex. Prose style gyrates from first-person hard-boiled sleuth to all-too-believable boardroom monotone. "Cities of the Red Night" is a long and involving opus that squirms its way through myriad plot-lines without collapsing into complete incomprehensibility (although at times it trods perilously close).
Rating:
Summary: Get Out of the Defensive Position
Review: Cities of the Red Night is William Burrough's magnum opus, the most sublime manefestation of his genius. From the opening chapter titles and hallucinatory invocation to the exquisitely fashioned closing dream sequence, each word bears the stamp of the studiously enigmatic visionary stylist. This novel impressed itself to the point that I met one of the characters in a dream, a truly disorienting experience. Sure, it's disjointed. Innoculation to the parasitic authority of the word virus, to see and feel in another medium, whaddaya think the poor guy's tryna say here, anyways?
Rating:
Summary: A Must For The Hard-Core WSB Lover...
Review: Here goes...Cities of The Red Night is a brilliant and often unsung apocalyptic masterpiece...be you a fanatic of 'Ole Billy Boy, this novel will come as sweet surprise...the prose is gut-wrenchingly fierce, the hop-skip-and-jump of the intertwined dimensional constructs will make your mind swim... It is revealing in every sense of the word of who Burroughs really was...With vehement subtlety he manages to break down all religious and social constructs to their basic forms of hate, fear and death, and reinvents himself in the process...Sure it's disgusting and vile at times, but this has always been a part of his incurring charm...Buy the book...sell your soul if you have to...(You have plenty more where it came from)...Cities of The Red Night is probably the most fantastic novel William S. Burroughs has fasioned...buy it...see for yourself...you could disagree with me, but you would be wrong, of course...
Rating:
Summary: The paradox of a post-modern classic...
Review: I first read this ten years ago, as my first introduction to Burroughs. I have always recommended it to folks who have never read Burroughs before, remembering it to be accessible and devoid of most of Burroughs more off-putting stylistic experiments (the cut-ups in Nova Express, the weird place/time shifts and unconnected narrative stream of Naked Lunch, etc) while still containing all that is great about his work: shocking and surprising imagery and a pure, sharp understanding of language. Surprisingly, despite the narrative accessibility, my recomendation has had a very low rate of success; it rarely results in new Burroughs-philes. Now, re-reading it, I think I know why. The stylistic simplicity disguises all the stuff going on underneath which is obvious to those who already know Burroughs.If someone didn't know better, _Cities of the Red Night_ might come across as a simplistic homosexual pornographic pulp space-opera, Mappelthorpe meets Edgar Rice Burroughs. The interwoven plot lines (homosexual pirate communes? a psychic private detective? an invading radioactive mutant virus?) come across as emotionally distant and vacuous, borrowed from pulp novels and used as a simple excuse for episodes of vivid sci-fi imagery and descriptions of boys with erections. While interesting, they don't seem to be the work of genius touted on the front cover. In the end, however, this book is hopeful and passionate, complex and absolutely unique. Burroughs is trying to both conjure up the conditions for a perfect utopia, a world free of all interference and control, as well as give a mythic explanation for the horrifying state of existence. Burroughs is trying to save us, explain us, destroy us, free us. This isn't apparent until after the plots have crashed together and shattered apart in an end which has absolutely nothing to do with what has come before, while also explaining everything... This may sound like general review-speak or inconsistent babble, but it is as close as I can come to explaining without giving away the ending. Burroughs uses the obvious, while distorting it, to keep the reader close. The themes Burroughs is working with are the things we touch everyday, the words we use and the feelings we experience, and the result Burroughs needs to reach is so far away from anything we know that he must use misdirection to get us there. Burroughs is a journalist reporting from the front of a war being fought every time we speak, glance, feel, want or touch. In order to reach an end that seems inconceivable, Burroughs must start from a beginning that we already know. Burroughs can seem repetitious and stylistically limited. I have always thought that Burroughs has always been a horizontal, impressionistic writer; his works have to be understood as a connect-the-dots description of fragments of a large, more terrifying whole that cannot be pointed to directly. Burroughs is like H.P. Lovecraft, telling the same story over and over in slightly different ways, except the elder gods who still threaten us live inside our daily language and relationships. Reading Burroughs requires work, like reading James Joyce. Reading the cut-up trilogy or Naked Lunch is difficult and requires effort; the paradox is that this book, being simpler, is more difficult. Unlike reading Joyce, the work required in reading this book isn't obvious. I think that this is still the book I will point people to, when they first express interest in Burroughs. Re-reading this book has simply reminded me of something I need to tell people: reading Burroughs is unlike reading anything else. You have to let him under your skin for his to make sense.
Rating: 
Summary: one of the worst books I ever read
Review: I tried to read this book when it first came out. I couldn't
finish it. There seem to be at least three themes or storylines in here struggling to get out. One seems to be a reasonably good alternative-history novel based on the idea that the pirate subculture of the 1700s might have formed a revolutionary constitutional regime. Unfortunately, this quickly becomes mixed up with maundering about certain ancient "cities of the red night" and a very great deal of homosexual imagery and fantasy. As the book goes on (as far as I read it, anyway) the main storyline becomes increasingly lost. I ultimately found it both distasteful and so muddled as to not be worth it.
Rating:
Summary: Bad Boy Bill reaches his pertgee of philosophy
Review: Misanthropic and challenging
in this work Bourroughs sees mankind as sociopathic an mindlessly devising methofs of self-extermination
difficul and difficult to put down
youll find that possible only to answer bodily demands for sustenance or elimination
ENJOY
Rating:
Summary: The Beginning Of Time
Review: While not nearly as engaging as Exterminator! or Naked Lunch, this shows an epic quality to his style and a tie-in centered around some ancient myth of the time before time, (when the world was advanced enough to cause its own demise) and using it as plot points for the strange tales evoked; from guerilla uprisings to life as it once was, to the pandemonium of the future. Fantastic introduction, calling on mythical demons and whatnot. Recollecting the events is, of course, foggy and chopped into so many fragments of absolute brilliance in hindsight; however not quite on top of his game.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a novel
Review: Why this work (along with others of William S. Burroughs) is called a "novel", beats me. William S. Burroughs has a dazzling and weird imagination, but totally unorganized. He's totally unwilling or unable to narrate a story, weave a plot, bring it to a conclusion. All the story lines lose themselves somewhere between the Caribbean and the Gobi Desert, leaving the reader none the wiser. The Author's obsession for erotic hanging verging on necrophilia didn't help making me appreciate the book.
Read Lethem, Storm Constantine, Neil Gaiman instead. They write REAL novels, and very good too!
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