Cities of the Red Night : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Dark red, the color of clotting blood, describes this tome
Review: Fine work, Billy-Boy. You've taken our fears and lusts and made them indistinguishable once again. This book reads like an aging encyclopedia of obscure mythologies wedged into a cheap detective novel, a set of antique postcards, a fantasy of the apocalypse, and some ancient volume of homosexual erotica. The sections on a virulent disease, a group of jolly pirates, a bizarre occult ritual and a heroin-powered nightmare funky-town inexplicably all fit together with each other in a way they absolutely could not had this book been written by anyone else. The writing was so compelling that I felt like violently retching at the description of the metallic shxt smell that hung over the afflicted, and was "affected" by the entire antique-cum-post-apocalypse style in a way I cannot ever hope to describe (I gave up long ago trying to put my feelings for this book into understandable English words). The whole book is a treasure chest waitin' ta be split open an' looted clean! Arr matey!

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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...

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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: Oh behave! [e-mail]
Review: I prefer this book to Naked Lunch, simply because it is more readable. I do enjoy the imagrey found in NL, but I would rather read a linear story than a cut up of word-virus and junk-image. This book impresses me, though, because of the way two stories run at once and then intertwine. It's a wonderful little cliche that I enjoy, especially when employed by Inspector Lee.

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.

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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: a "come all you weary strangers and a story i might tell"
Review: Not the most gripping novel of Burroughs it serves to introduce him very well. Here the most daring explorer of words of the twentieth century broke into the territory of the nineteenth century novel and its filosophical background without entirely playing by its rules of course. First reason to read this book is that it leads you to the far more challenging and swifter written second and third part of the trilogy to which it belongs. Although fragmented it is quite accessible in Burroughs terms, but therefore also a bit boring at times. The vastness of its scope, as if you are presented with a grand painting of Delacroix in which all that is of worth in this world is presented, is enticing enough. Central theme might be evolution taken to its extremes. And without much further ado it prophesies some diseases and other threats with which we fool ourselfs in becoming adjusted just now. Notice how accurate the descriptions of this writer can be, who has so many times been accused of drugblurred nonsense.

Rating:
Summary: Review of Cities Of The Red Night
Review: Of Burroughs' later work, this is possibly the most readable in conventional terms. Originally sub-titled "A Boy's Book", it was molded by the adventure stories he read as a boy in the 1920's and 30's, and uses the genres of the detective story and the pirate yarn to give its shape.

Typically for Burroughs, the novel begins with several false starts before a narrative begins to emerge - two stories, two centuries apart, being told simultaneously. Magic plays a key part in the plot, making some events and actions mysterious, not to say incomprehensible, but helping to unite the two tales.

Eventually the two stories meet in the mythical Cities of the Red Night, where the theme of rebellion against total oppression is enacted in a series of vivid, dream-like episodes. His idealized youths fight the good fight against mutants and matriarchs, until victory seems within their grasp...

This book is part of Burroughs' so-called Late Trilogy (being followed by The Place Of Dead Roads and The Western Lands) and includes characters and events from these later books and from previous works, but this novel can certainly stand alone as well. A rich and disorienting experience.

Rating:
Summary: cities of the red night
Review: open the door on cities of red night and you are confronted with a bosch like vista of inverted reality. unlike the 60s cut-ups this is more accessible although don't open it expecting anything approaching a lineal narrative because burroughs doesnt do anything the straight way. if you are amused by the image of a six foot centipede with a translucent humanhead then this is the book for you. burroughs rewires time, dismantles perspectives and generally dislocates your expectations. cities of the red night is a strange but exhilarating trip which will leave the reader wrong footed and breathlessly disorientated. try it out.

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Summary: Billy Burroughs Done Wrote an Epic.
Review: This book is unlike many of Burroughs's prior works in that there is an actual plot. The story itself centers on a cult of control freaks who are trying to destroy the world through the release of a Virus. A private detective hired onto the case does some digging -- with some paranormal help -- and traces the cult back to the Cities Of The Red Night, which existed before recorded history. Burroughs crafts this story as only a true master could, at first enchanting you, then throwing you through fear, horror, nausea, awe and irony, and finally leaving you feeling as if you've been in a car crash (without all the nasty bills to pay). All at once, you get a sense of just how overwhelming this world is that he has created, and you wonder if maybe, given more time, and the will to do so, he might have created an anti-Narnia. As it turns out, he did. Cities of the Red Night is just one part of what turns out to be a trilogy of Burroughs's views on religion and metaphysics. The other two books, Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, take the world and worldview in Cities of the Red Night and expands them to cover his metaphysics and his views of the afterlife. Burroughs isn't looking to make friends with these works; in fact many people will be downright offended by what is contained in these books, especially his anti-Christian sentiments. In the end, though, the reader (well, *this* reader anyway) is left with a sense that Burroughs was trying to be more than a writer with these books. Perhaps, he was trying to be a prophet.