This is certainly bizarre. It's based on Burroughs' own drug-filled experiences, a loosely constructed novel - almost a series of vignettes - that are at once hallucinatory, surreal, and satirical. It's also genuinely grotesque, but as Burroughs points out (the edition I read included end pieces and various out-takes from a number of sources) that was exactly the point: drug addiction is sickness and sickness isn't pretty.

I have to admit I was in two minds about it. I was rating it a fairly solid three stars for most of the book. A lot of it's not to my taste, but there's some genuinely clever stuff going on here, and some of the satirical elements especially are brutally cutting. There's also a lot of really imaginative imagery, just astonishingly vivid, that I couldn't help but appreciate. But as it went on, and on, and on (all that extra end material didn't help) I began to drag. It took me a while to get through this book, and in places I had to force myself to go on. Not because of all the grotesquerie, but because I'd begun to be so fed up with the shapelessness and repetition of the whole thing. I was beginning to feel the sort of mild irritation I feel with two star reads in general, and I think at the end what I took away was that, incredible imagery aside, if you're going to want me to read 300 odd pages of anything, there had better be a damn narrative in there somewhere. And there wasn't here, or not enough of one, and I'd begun to find the whole thing moving on to tiresome the longer it went on. On balance, though, I've stuck to the three star rating largely on the strength of the imagery (and on the understanding that, if I'd read another edition, it would have been two-thirds the length and I would have had less time to get sick of it.)