I would like to be able to say that Cities Of The Red Night is William Burroughs' most successful fiction since Naked Lunch, that it pushes beyond the kaleidoscopic kineticism of that telegraphic masterpiece to discover some terrible beauty powerful enough to shock us out of our complacency as the planet is poisoned. Although the book is full if its stunning surprises, they may shock only the uninitiated.

Burroughs has by now been transcribing his renegade vision of apocalypse and plague for over three decades. He sees the end of possibility in America as one karmic consequence of western imperialism, and takes as a symptom of our diseased state the internal cancer of bureaucratic systems. He has presented this view with a fierce and lonely intensity without making it particularly accessible. Burroughs has been the perennial innovator, and the linguistic deconditioning demanded by the Naked Lunch tetralogy, the maze-mosaic architecture, the parodies and cut-ups, the volatility of character metamorphosis has all insured an audience of cognoscenti. There have been promises in recent years, in The Wild Boys and Exterminator especially, that Burroughs was ready to return to narrative (if not to the naturalistic voice of his first novel, Junky, at least to telling stories instead of sinister vaudeville) but Cities Of The Red Night is a return to his essential mode of fragmented dissonance.

Cities Of The Red Night is full of the exotically turbulent purgatory which has for so long characterized Burroughs' world….

Burroughs has always given us sights, sounds and smells with an insistent clarity, sometimes unsettling his readers with a lurid lyricism. His voice is often laconic and his sentences sparse so that the images flash forward all the more brilliantly. These qualities are evident in Cities of the Red Night as well as the attempt to tell a story in the juxtaposed fashion of Faulkner's The Wild Palms, where two narratives are played off against each other….

[But just] when Burroughs has us tantalized, halfway through his book, and without ever resolving either narrative, he introduces us to the Cities of the Red Night, a group of six fabulous places existing in the Gobi Desert 100,000 years ago that destroy each other and the planet in a cataclysmic war….

Plot, in Burroughs' hands, is evidently in the service of an imagination that works mythically rather than historically, and his book is full of parallels to Circe and Pan, to tarot figures, to arcane Egyptian and Mayan magic rituals. Cities Of The Red Night is the latest installment in Burroughs' own grimly lurid Comedie Humaine, one unredeemed by hope or human features. Though not as formally explosive as Naked Lunch, Cities Of The Red Night is a powerful book and a hauntingly macabre entertainment.