Joshua Gonsalves's Reviews > The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead

That’s a Burroughs novel alright. I could list some adjectives right now to give you a sense of what I mean by that exactly. Simply put: this novel is twisted, crazy, fucked-up, weird, sexually explicit, extreme, simultaneously unreadable and entertaining, funny, disturbing, raw, wild, satirical, avant-garde, surreal, and plenty more.

Burroughs’s unconventional semi-dystopian vision is repetitive and occasionally vaguely annoying, but it’s also filled to the brim with brilliance and state-of-the-art mindfuckery, leading the reader down a pit of unfiltered insanity. Alongside its political satire, literary experimentation, and rebellious spirit are sometimes gross and always explicit descriptions of hardcore homoerotic sexual fantasies that delve into the most bizarre corners of human sexuality and intermingle with surrealistic imagery and the implementation of Burroughs’s famous “cut-up” style, making these strange, fascinating fantasies all the more dizzying to read. Being rather used to heavily bizarre and explicit sexual content in literature (in large part thanks to the other Burroughs works I have read), not much in The Wild Boys truly shocked me; however, this numbness to the content’s shock value did not stop the memorability and insanity of these sequences from having an impact. Getting a glimpse inside the perverted and ingenious mind of William S. Burroughs is always a treat, overtly shocking or not, and this novel does not disappoint. It manages to mix surprisingly linear and plot-oriented chapters with sections of confusing, dreamlike madness with little sense beyond sexual desire or drug induced creativity driving them. It’s not his masterpiece, but it is a worthy entry in his bibliography that is a must-read for those who are as in love with experimental and transgressive fiction as I am.