The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead

by William S. Burroughs

Book Overview

Burroughs' coolly brilliant, futuristic tale of global warfare, in which a guerrilla gang of boys dedicated to freedom battles the organized armies of repressive police states, was first published in 1971. Every college and university library must have all of Burroughs. Annotation copyright Book New

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B000PA0S2A
• ISBN13: 9780802133311
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 193 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

To Disturb Your Sleep

I was something of an innocent when I read The Wild Boys and it gave me nightmares. The staccato, choppy plot is too disjointed to ever really allow anything to come to a close so the images tend to remain in some vestibule of the brain and come spilling out at night when your poor consciousness tries to form them into some kind of completeness. The images themselves are sometimes gruesome and you can almost sense Burroughs' lunatic energy and all his wild imaginings spilling out on the page and being herded-somewhat unsuccessfully- into the form of a novel. Some people will have trouble with the homosexual imagery, but almost everyone will be haunted to some extent by the casual eroticization of death and cruelty-I think the Mayan sequences are some of the most persistent. But this is not mere incoherent pornography, there is a wild, energetic beauty and an almost religious devotion to wontonly intense experience that is-along with WSB's poetic style-unforgettable. Lynn Hoffman, author of the much-less disturbing bang BANG: A Novel and the downright soothing New Short Course in Wine,The

"Time to move into first place..."

A square - a story inside other stories - the interaction of ghosts with the living - and the living with being reborn.This was the first Burroughs I'd read. It read like a series of short stories connected like a poem. Burroughs language flows then stutters and then squares back on itself. The way he experiments with the sound and repetition of words - was exciting and something I find I do in my own writing.I found myself keeping track of themes - St. Louis, and green (Greenbaum, Green Inn, Green Nun, Greenfield, Green Hat), and a constant reference to 1920. I haven't read much biography on Burroughs; that should come next.Burroughs exploration of a future that becomes more primitive even as it advances, his unabashed and open erotic descriptions as a consequence of his future rather than as an expected sidetrip, and his clean and no holds barred language require that I read more of his work.

"Satan, I will destroy you forever!"-The General

I was trying to refrain from doing a Burroughs review 'cause Burroughs is brilliant and there would just be too much to talk about and if I simplified it it would sound like the other reviews and then this would be a big whammpit-sized waste of time right. In saying that pointless phrase I mastered the art of stream-of-conciousness, something William Seward Burroughs is renowned or. I must say, WSB was a big influence on my lyrical style that is in my music...I only have 5 of his books and have read Cities Of THe Red Night, but those alone only grasp part of his chaotic journey in literature. Alright, enough blabbering in hero worship, something the man himself was against...Although mellowed and not as controversial as previous books, THe Wild Boys is still truly awesome. The main plot when there is one centers around a variety of boys from all around the globe joining together (often engaging in destructive homosexual imagery, which WSB explains in vivid detail) and devising up beautiful if primative ways of tearing down the system and preparing for the cataclysmic wave of catharsis that is apocalypse. Nothing Burroughs writes can come to any real good. He;s not trying to make the world a better more peaceful place, he's trying to come to terms with the varied forms of violence and insanity inside all of us, and essentially creating something that transcends all boundaries and leaves out practically nothing. He's a literary genius and packs so many lucid descriptions of his mesmeric apocalyptic world and the wild people that inhibit it, but can also rise from these often free flowing images to produce feircely dark humour (Something seen more so in Naked Lunch, you can pick your finger at random sections and find something any morbid mind will laugh with.) Amusing sections of THE Wild Boys include extremely religious covenant where the nuns control their paritioners with drugs and retardation techniques, while the head nun has frequent visions of "Jesus with ..."; a densely packed and hypocritical aristocratic party that lasts a whole month and includes every single thing you could want from the fanciest food to almost all forms of sexual taboos, while the poor outside starve to death...that part leaves Burroughs contradicting himself which is frequent in his universe, loving the uncontrolled nature of things but having a soft spot for the victims of it.Some of the most beautiful chapters include "The Dead Child", which starts out with the narrative of an unwanted asumed poor misfit which leads through twists and turns to the narrative of ancient (now long forgotten) Indians fleeing their diseased city and eventually becoming ghosts prowling the jungle and engaging in phantom sex (something which is explained more so elsewhere in the book); "THe Miracle Of THe Rose" (which sounds like some church Christmas special) shows a few wild boys heading in the land of the blue silence and into a rose-colored book which seems to alter reality; the last c

Burrough's Best?

At fourteen I read The Wild Boys and was completely in awe of William S. Burroughsgenius without knowing that others in the world were aware of his genius. Though disturbed and horrified by his imagery of a violent world of homosexual renegade boys, it did not tempt me to judge his work as merely pornographic or solely for those of prurient interests. As soon as I could find a source for procuring "The Naked Lunch"(a local Baptist college!), I tried to read it with the same expectations. Although certainly The Naked Lunch was an excellent work, I was disappointed, for I felt it never even came close in scope or power. Even years later, after having read quite a few of Burroughs books, I feel The Wild Boys to be unsurpassed in the Burroughsian Ouvre! When one of his works proves me wrong, I will write another review. Until then, reader beware, this book will change you, and maybe not for the better. But you will not remain neutral,for certain!

Read it if you wished Naked Lunch had been better.

After reading Burroughs' more famous novel, Naked Lunch, I was interested but disappointed. Burroughs was much too high when he wrote it and many parts an incoherant. However, the lucid intervals were very well written and I wanted to read a book he wrote when he was more in control. The Wild Boys is that book. A poignant masterpiece that will push anyone who reads close to tears. Far better than Naked Lunch, anyone who thinks Burroughs was a one-trick pony should read it.