It's hard to imagine what once seemed so liberating about The Naked Lunch, a famous cult novel of the Beat generation. A not unsympathetic critic, Leslie Fiedler, found much of it 'dull protest literature, manifestoes against cops and in favour of junkies and homosexuals'—which is not sympathetic, but not right either. I can't call to mind anything less 'in favour of' drugs or homosexuals. Burroughs was being honest about his own opium addiction, which he saw as dependence and subjection, and thus as one of the representative horrors of civilisation. But neither was it an effective 'protest' novel. The mayhem he depicted, whether caused by cops or other 'control systems' in society or in the mind or body or in outer space, was such as to rob protest of any meaning. This is particularly true of a favourite image, the hanged man's orgasm, which occurred so obsessively and to such numbing effect that it removed the horror from hanging just as surely as it removed anything erotic from the orgasm. The furious energy of destruction in the orgies of The Naked Lunch was about as liberating as a Tom and Jerry cartoon….

Cities of the Red Night strikes me as a blander, more literary sort of novel, with patches of urbane narrative in quite an 18th-century vein; and with parodies of other literary styles, which temporarily help the reader to get his bearings…. [But Burroughs shows no sign of change] in the 'Red Night' sections of this novel, and draws his imagery as before from Science Fiction and sex and death. (p. 22)

In the light of his actual fictions, Burroughs's claims to enlightened intentions, which include a plea for The Naked Lunch as a tract against capital punishment, do seem exceptionally shaky. But what is more interesting is the way he himself undoes the respectability of the claims. For [in Cities of the Red Night] it's a serious point about the pirates' utopia that it very quickly turns nasty. The boy-hero is soon convinced of the need to eliminate 'troublemakers' from the commune…. This is about as far as a serious point is taken in Burroughs, but it's far enough to reveal the pessimism underlying the liberal claims and the utopian fantasy. It shows, too, in his images, which often have an obverse and a reverse side, so that 'languid youths stretched naked in the sun' on one page becomes on the next 'a gang of naked boys covered with erogenous sores'. But mainly what drains any meaning out of the banal eldorado is … the hanging-orgasm syndrome and the repetitive sex—the 'idiot mambo' he now calls it. (p. 23)