God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking s--thouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire
The Place of Dead Roads is a novel written by William S. Burroughs. Released in 1983, it is the second novel in Burroughs' Red Night trilogy and serves as an inversion of the Western genre.
Characters[]
- The Crying Gun
- The Priest
- Kim Carson, the Nihilistic Kid
rest to be added
Publisher's summary[]
A controversial reworking of well-trodden American myth by the author of ‘Naked Lunch’.
This surreal fable, set in America’s Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America.
Fantastical and humorous, ‘The Place of Dead Roads’ continues William Burroughs’ exploration of society’s controlling forces – the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs – with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.
See also[]
| Title | Author | Release date | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West | Cormac McCarthy | 1985 | A similar inversion of the Western genre |
| Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down | Ishmael Reed | 1969 | A similar inversion of the Western genre |
| The Hawkline Monster | Richard Brautigan | 1974 | A similar inversion of the Western genre |
| The Beetle Leg | John Hawkes | 1951 | A similar inversion of the Western genre |
Sources[]
- Goodreads
- Wikipedia
| Works of William S. Burroughs | ||
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Novels | ||