The Place of Dead Roads: A Novel

William S. Burroughs

Nov 2013 · Holt Paperbacks

About this ebook

A good old-fashion shoot-out in the American West of the frontier days serves as the springboard for this hyperkinetic adventure in which gunslingers, led by Kim Carson, fight for galactic freedom. The Place of Dead Roads is the second novel in the trilogy with Cities of the Red Night and The Western Lands.

Ratings and reviews

Terrific. Guy gets shot at the opening, escapes reality and starts to explore other possibilities, at first biographical but increasingly fantastical, as far back as the origins of language and as far out as the planet Venus, but however, whenever and wherever far he goes, there's no escaping that opening shot. Lots of laugh out loud and profound indignation and outrage at the limitations imposed on us by the social body and, ultimately the physical body too!

About the author

William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis in 1914. He is best-known work is 1959's Naked Lunch—which became the focus of a landmark 1962 Supreme Court decision that helped eliminate literary censorship in the United States. Described by Norman Mailer as one of America's few writers genuinely "possessed by genius," he died in 1997. His many other works include Junky and Cities of the Red Night (Picador).