Cities Of The Red Night (Paperback)

If someone didn't know better, _Cities of the Red Night_ might come across as a simplistic homosexual pornographic pulp space-opera, Mappelthorpe meets Edgar Rice Burroughs. The interwoven plot lines (homosexual pirate communes? a psychic private detective? an invading radioactive mutant virus?) come across as emotionally distant and vacuous, borrowed from pulp novels and used as a simple excuse for episodes of vivid sci-fi imagery and descriptions of boys with erections. While interesting, they don't seem to be the work of genius touted on the front cover.

In the end, however, this book is hopeful and passionate, complex and absolutely unique. Burroughs is trying to both conjure up the conditions for a perfect utopia, a world free of all interference and control, as well as give a mythic explanation for the horrifying state of existence. Burroughs is trying to save us, explain us, destroy us, free us. This isn't apparent until after the plots have crashed together and shattered apart in an end which has absolutely nothing to do with what has come before, while also explaining everything...

This may sound like general review-speak or inconsistent babble, but it is as close as I can come to explaining without giving away the ending. Burroughs uses the obvious, while distorting it, to keep the reader close. The themes Burroughs is working with are the things we touch everyday, the words we use and the feelings we experience, and the result Burroughs needs to reach is so far away from anything we know that he must use misdirection to get us there. Burroughs is a journalist reporting from the front of a war being fought every time we speak, glance, feel, want or touch. In order to reach an end that seems inconceivable, Burroughs must start from a beginning that we already know.

Burroughs can seem repetitious and stylistically limited. I have always thought that Burroughs has always been a horizontal, impressionistic writer; his works have to be understood as a connect-the-dots description of fragments of a large, more terrifying whole that cannot be pointed to directly. Burroughs is like H.P. Lovecraft, telling the same story over and over in slightly different ways, except the elder gods who still threaten us live inside our daily language and relationships. Reading Burroughs requires work, like reading James Joyce. Reading the cut-up trilogy or Naked Lunch is difficult and requires effort; the paradox is that this book, being simpler, is more difficult. Unlike reading Joyce, the work required in reading this book isn't obvious.

I think that this is still the book I will point people to, when they first express interest in Burroughs. Re-reading this book has simply reminded me of something I need to tell people: reading Burroughs is unlike reading anything else. You have to let him under your skin for his to make sense.