Rating: 
Summary: Immortality won't be the same
Review: Burroughs has produced a post-modern version of the "Book of the Dead" (both the Tibetan and ancient Egyptian versions). He wasn't content to just re-spin the legend, but created a disturbing look at all of our fears and hopes for the afterlife. Immortality isn't always what you think.
Rating:
Summary: Burroughs at his best.
Review: Granted, it takes awhile before one can really appreciate this author for the humor and fantasmical plots he delivers. When I first starting reading Burroughs, specifically Cities of the Red Night, I was enchanted but didn't find him altogether funny -- now I read back on much of his material and find myself laughing outloud. Like the other books in the series -- all of which I have read (the Cities of the Red Night and the Place of Dead Roads are the other books in the series in respective order) -- we are given glimpse into madness, multiple hooks, sound logic in commentary of the world and abundant odd tirades (the Valley certainly was neat!) Many consider works of Burroughs prose and rightfully so; the storyline is not at all like that of your standard novel. In any event, it makes for splendid reading and is additionally great inspiration to anyone who seeks to write especially since it tells us it isn't always requisite to create in a manner that lands material fitting into a specific mold. I liked this book much more then the Place of Dead Roads -- it seems more focused and more driven. I think I would probably rank it right alongside Cities of the Red Night, perhaps even a notch higher because it's so damn funny at times.
Rating: 
Summary: more madness from Bill the junky.
Review: having read Mailer's 'Ancient Evenings' Bill takes over where Egypt leaves off. a cowpoke novelette taking place in a desert of unknown origin. Bill is at his best.
Rating:
Summary: A scathing deconstruction of Western society
Review: In "The Place of Dead Roads," the second volume of the "Cities of the Red Night" trilogy, Burroughs continues his scathing deconstruction of Western society, making a murderously funny mockery of hypocrisy and hum-drum normality. Written with a practiced mix of anger and nostalgia, "The Place of Dead Roads" is like a prison confession written in some other dimension, a rollicking synthesis of Burroughs tropes old and new. Join Kim Carsons on his nightmare quest to rid the planet of its addictions: it's a surreal and haunting literary journey, the last 100 pages of which witness Burroughs at his visionary best.
Rating: 
Summary: A repetition...
Review: Long after most of his beat friends had bitten the dust, Bill Burroughs kept plugging away, eventually holed up in a modest house in Lawrence, Kansas, still sharing his "apocalyptic vision" with the world. If only that vision had continued to evolve over the last, say, forty years. The main criticism of this, and almost every Burroughs work since "Naked Lunch" will be that his vision never grew past its initial basic idea: that modern social relations were still primitivistic, and that a better way could be found through extreme aloofness, suspicion, homosexuality. Cultivate a mercenary personality and share it with only your best boyfriend. Could Burroughs write a simple love-story that touched the heart -- I guess we'll never know, because it seems, since the promise of "queer" he never again tried. What we have here is the same space-age, doomsday meltdown that Burroughs has been writing since his first cut-up. Sure, he's added the odd touch (the postulation of seven souls, The vague Western Lands themselves) but he repeats himself constantly, right down to the phrasing, and imagery. Chronic social-disgust does not great art make. Yes, he still has the ability to shock in a dignified way, a cool quirk and nicely done, old boy. I'd pick this one up for one reason only: to watch a writer die. He wrote his death with this one, and you can achieve a degree of morbid satisfaction through its last 50-60 pages, as the writer withers away. But by then he's done nothing but avoid writing a fresh novel, by his consistent desertion of the storyline. If he sees it fresh, why can't he do a better job relaying it to the reader? Still, this guy died alone surrounded by a bunch of cats. That has its appeal, after all. Buy it after Junky, Queer, Naked Lunch, and the rest of the trilogy, but before you venture in cut-up territory. If you must.
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Summary: Quien es?
Review: Refusing to designate the human as a unitary enitity, Burroughs compels us to schizophrenize our psychic lives via the Egyptian inspiration that we have Seven Souls, representing the miscellany of psychic forces which vie for possession of the egoistic "I" (in the novel, Mr. Eight-Ball). *Quien es?* [Who's there?] "There is intrigue among the souls, and treachery. No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls"(6). Once the reader has mastered this logic of multiplicity, he is ready for Burroughs's second novelistic reality-engine, his attempt to write a new Book of the Dead, an effort to alert the reader of his/her submissive, zombie-like role in the interstices of turn-of-the-century capitalist subjectivity, to grant us the psychic weapons to wage war on the necromantic cultural artifacts which surround us and construct us; a quest to reposition oneself in disjunction with these seven spirits of control and subjugation. The paradise of the Western Lands can only be viewed from the sunken regions of the Land of the Dead, the *kenoma* or cosmological emptiness within which we wander. Those readers who can survive the brutal exigencies of the pilgrim's death-march will realize with Burroughs that Immortality is, in all finality, coextensive with Purpose and Function, a becoming-Active which precedes the constitution of the ego and will survive that ego's demise. The Western Lands will always exist as that unreachable horizon of eternal sanctity and gratification, a Lie against time whose intoxicating sovereignty will stand as an impetus to transgress the optical illusion of Mr. Eight-Ball, the unadulterated "I" installed as chimera and despot. "I want to reach the Western Lands - right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It's a frozen sewer. All the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands. Let it flow! How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he "wants." You have to be in Hell to see Heaven. Glimpses from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy, a joy as old as suffering and despair."(257-258).
Rating:
Summary: The West Is The Best.
Review: Review: Contains highly condensed scenarios in past present and future time. Rarefied and raw dream and after-death encounters and conflicts, with unforgettable characters in a multitude of hilarious satiric black humor routines, will stab you in the ribs with a poisoned quill. Not for the squeamish, dogmatic or uninformed. ¡novel biological mutations! Step right up. William S. Burroughs' examination of the function of the author is so candid and deeply moving that its authenticity can't be denied. The poems, "Breathe in your death" and "I WORK FOR THE BLACK HOLE,..." are, respectively, an exquisite cut-up and an informed, funny post-scientific verse. Who can award a Commander of Arts and Letters of this caliber less than 5 stars?
Like to offer a few simple pointers to help in navigating through this most accomplished and inspired of Burroughs' works. Starting with the title "The Western Lands," which in ancient Egyptian would read "Amenta," referring to the land of the dead who, by tradition, were always entombed to the west of Egypt. In present time, the most potent power accumulation is concentrated in the West. Suddenly you might recognize Western Culture as overwhelmed by material wealth, wielding the technology for total dominance/destruction, but metaphysically only "minutes away" from total bankruptcy. Burroughs wastes no words over this formula: spiritual bankruptcy = death. Species disappearing from the planet faster than the rising national debts.
Most important to understand, ladies and gentlemen, the possibility of much of his fiction as factual analogs. He delineates the 7 souls, Hollywood style, with deadly humor. The existence of Immortality isn't just the question of an eccentric old man. It's a question all civilizations face, and there's nothing frivolous about it when a dying culture sees it has no answers. Naturally, (profiting from the course of collapse) Nazis, Mafias, CIA, KGB and other boards and syndicates all have walk-on parts. All all all only to be topped and toppled by the inexorable expansion of the white light of Margaras (Skt.). The cat Margaras is the agent of total awareness and observation. Break this book open at any page and be amazed.
Rating:
Summary: a true coming to an end of an ever searching genius
Review: The trilogy to which this lucid novel belongs marked a slowing down of pace for this writer who had become so renown for his soaring and shocking books. Yet, especially in Place of the Dead Roads and Western Lands, his vision sinks in far more deeply and the sheer beauty of its imagery is the light behind the doors of perception which his previous work has kicked in. Always someone who showed no mercy to those who wanted to hide from reality and whose words were like bullets, here in the final part Burroughs grabs you by the throat by talking to you in a unexpectedly human voice of a world beyond death and humanity. He always was a poet, but here he truly sings, be it a swan song.
Rating:
Summary: Burroughs's best work. Period.
Review: The Western Lands has all the scatter-brained and scatological charm that any of WSB's finest portrays, but not only is this particular story, the third installment of the Cities of the Red Night trilogy, form at its best, the content transcends anything else he's written. In his old age, WSB had an incredible emotional sadness about him, and this novel, which becomes semi-autobiographical at its end, leaves you profoundly touched in a way Naked Lunch never did and few novels ever can. The whole thing is worth reading if nothing else for the Wishing Box chapter at the work's conclusion.
Rating:
Summary: Burroughs=Genius!!
Review: This is Burroughs in top form, summing up a fantastic voyage across the mental-scapes of the Death that constitutes Western Civilization, this is probably my favorite of all of Burroughs' novels.
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