books:

	• The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (Burroughs, William S.) William S. Burroughs Grove Press, 1994 - 193 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This was the first Burroughs I'd read. It read like a series of short stories connected like a poem. Burroughs language flows then stutters and then squares back on itself. The way he experiments with the sound and repetition of words - was exciting and something I find I do in my own writing.

I found myself keeping track of themes - St. Louis, and green (Greenbaum, Green Inn, Green Nun, Greenfield, Green Hat), and a constant reference to 1920. I haven't read much biography on Burroughs; that should come next.

Burroughs exploration of a future that becomes more primitive even as it advances, his unabashed and open erotic descriptions as a consequence of his future rather than as an expected sidetrip, and his clean and no holds barred language require that I read more of his work.

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Pretty standard for a post-Naked Lunch Burroughs novel

Burroughs is basically a love-him-or-leave-him writer. Using a slightly more lucid version of his "cut-up" style, The Wild Boys is a book about a group of, well, wild boys rising up in the face of a very oppressive society. Yes, there is lots of sex, most of it homosexual, but once past that Burroughs shows some interesting sociological insight. Burroughs is a satirist at heart, and in this case he is clearly on the Boys' side as he tries to "expose" the bedroom lives of the Moral Majority. However, Wild Boys brings more with a clear message to rebel against these oppressive forces and enjoy life.

We begin the book with glimpses of the corruption of the oppressing classes in a fantastical estate resembling a strange Neverland ranch. Rich people are invited to a long stay by the host where they eat, hangglide, and have sex. The starving masses are locked outside and taunted by the estate staff.

Then, we move on to the Boys' who also have their own bizzare society, but Burroughs tries hard to write it in a much more positive light. Ritualistic and spiritual, the Boys band together and fight back for their freedom.

Burroughs adds some interesting styles to the mix. Color plays a huge role and are often used to describe characters and places. Many times whole pages are nothing more than the same passage in slightly different variations written repeatedly. Sometimes these experimentations are interesting, other times they are tiresome. The plot, such as it is, starts and stops throughout the book. Some of the chapters are quite lucid and describe the war between the millitary and the Wild Boy tribes; other chapters, and the basic theme in these repeats, deal only with a few characters as they throw caution to the wind and succumb to their homosexual desires.

While this may not be the best Burroughs novel I've read, it's certainly memorable. There is a lot to discover here, but some may not be willing to wade through the uneven style or sex to find it.

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To Disturb Your Sleep

I was something of an 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

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Armed and dangerous

This novel reminds me of Kevin Esser's Dance of the Warriors and of the Venezuelan movie Sicario. They all deal with worlds in which gangs of teenagers are engaged in violence and sex. This is the best of the three. It is disturbing and is not for the conventional, and certainly not for the bleeding-heart types who want the United Nations to abolish the use of boys in war. Only Burroughs could have written it. The style is as unconventional as the theme. This is a world in which morality does not exist.

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