What do You think about The Wild Boys (1994)?
I was relatively 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
—Lynn
New rule: if the book reviews talk about it being one of the author's most accessible works, I need to lower my expectations. Maybe I just didn't get what he was trying to do here, but I am partial to plot and character development and other old fashioned novel features.I did like the frame if the story, talking about these events as if they were movies.I got used to and eventually appreciated some of the repetitions of important phrases.I like symbolism -- and this book was overflowing with it -- but not at the expense of other features.Overall: way low on my list of favorite books ever. Practically at the bottom.
—Jay
William S Burroughs does not like women or at least he did not like his distopian fantasies to contain any flattering versions of them. I would not expect a man who shot his wife in the head accidentally while trying to shoot a shot glass off her head (while wasted I might add) to have any use for women (although it is said that he was deeply sorry and remorseful for having "accidentally" murdered his wife.) He even says so in his wild distopian world where women are eventually used as surrogates to make more wild boys and they have no need to even come remotely in contact with any awful women creatures from the time they are born. That being said I still enjoy Burroughs' writing. It is engaging and creative and perverse in a way that only Burroughs can be. This book is filled with pages and pages of raw sweaty gay male sex (but is not without its own sensitivities), war, violence, decadence and drug references. This is why I love Burroughs he just said things in a way no one else does and the fact that he does not want any women in his distopian fantasy world filled with young men who are filled with an isatiable lust for each other and a lust for violence really does not bother me one bit. This is his fantasy world not mine and I am glad he wrote it down so I could get a glimpse into it. We need books like this. Books that scare and disgust people but at the same open your mind to a new way of thinking and writing.
—Mel
