August 30, 2025 by A.S. Van Dorston

In this series I count down my top twenty all-time favorite books. “We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems” — William S. Burroughs

The summer before college, my reading list started with Jack Kerouc’s On The Road (1957). 17 is a good age for that book and I enjoyed it. I first became aware of Burroughs through Laurie Anderson, who collaborated with him numerous times, and used his quote “Language is a virus from outer space.” So when Kerouac called Burroughs the “greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift“, Naked Lunch seemed to be a logical next step. Hoo boy, more like a leap off a cliff. While both, along with Allan Ginsburg, formed the core literary representatives of the Beat Generation, Burrough’s is the polar opposite of Kerouac. Six years older, gay, and educated at Harvard with post-grad work in Anthropology and med school in Vienna, Burroughs had a brittle, cynical sense of humor, while Kerouac, at least in his early work, had a more youthful openness to wonder and adventure. Naked Lunch is fantastical, but in a depraved, hallucinatory manner akin to the nightmarish hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. The fragmented semi-autobiographical narrative spans from William Lee’s journey from NYC through Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Mexico City, and Tangier and breaking through to surreal locations of Interzone (inspired by Tangier, a gritty, surreal vice-ridden setting with run by four political parties that represent different types of control), Freeland (totalitarian wellfare state) and Annexia (dystopian police state).

While the extent of the book’s influence on 20th century culture can be measured by not only the writers inspired by it (Hunter S. Thompson, Kathy Acker, William Gibson, J.G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Alan Moore, Jean Genet, Angela Carter), but also bands (Steely Dan, The Mugwumps, Interzone, Nova Express, Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, and Mick Farren’s fictional Willy’s Rats), it’s certainly not for everyone. The depravity can be intense, and it’s not surprising that it was initially banned in the U.S. Check out how gross this fairly known passage is:

“Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound. A sound you could smell. This man worked for the carnival, you dig? And to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. After a while, the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared… and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teethlike… little raspy incurving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it… but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street… shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags. Nobody loved it. And it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth. Finally, it talked all the time, day and night. You could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up… beating at it with his fists… and sticking candles up it, but… nothing did any good, and the asshole said to him… “It is you who will shut up in the end, not me… “because we don’t need you around here anymore. I can talk and eat and shit.”

After that, he began waking up in the morning with transparent jelly… like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands… like burning gasoline jelly and grow there. So, finally, his mouth sealed over… and the whole head… would have amputated spontaneously except for the eyes, you dig? That’s the one thing that the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. Nerve connections were blocked… and infiltrated and atrophied. So, the brain couldn’t give orders anymore. It was trapped inside the skull… sealed off. For a while, you could see… the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes. And then finally the brain must have died… because the eyes went out… and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eye at the end of a stalk.”

I wonder if someone from med school in Vienna inspired the demented Dr. Benway:

“He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: I don't give them time to die,' he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. Fucking undisciplined cells!’ he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.”

In college I read his first book Junky (1953) and had The Soft Machine (1961), the first part of his SF Nova Trilogy on my TBR list, and 35 years later I still haven’t gotten to it. Despite my workstudy gig being in the library, I had little spare time for reading in my schedule packed with triple majors (history, political science, gender studies), a minor in journalism, sports (XC and track), political activism, my radio show, girlfriends, editing the arts section of the school paper, writing for journals and zines, a second off-campus job to feed my music habit, etc.

Naked Lunch was engraved into my still-growing brain, and has never left. Despite never having gone through a complete re-read since the summer of ’87, my dog-eared paperback copy had many passages that I’d return to over the years.