reviews

Naked Lunch is like an interrupted fever dream, warm and roiling with madness. The lusciousness of its perfect descriptions tumble like embers onto the hardwood floor. It’s the perfect cold winter book and it makes a very decent Christmas sentimentalism vaccine. It’s important to resist the emotional left-handed sugar of Christmas. It’s a chemically altered defoliant meant only to give you even sweeter cravings. I was thirteen when I first read Naked Lunch. As a weird kid I clung to its beautiful strangeness like a raft. Schools had us reading books about young wholesome sweet girls and their pretty horses. In a book report I gave a detailed review of the sexual subtext inherent to all horse girl books. When I suggested, with humour, that authors should skip the suppressed boyfriend lust and just let the girl have sex with the horse, I was called into the principal’s office. When I was spit out of the educational system two years later, they took a crowbar to my locker. There, they found my collection of books banned by the school board which included Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. That was the last time I saw my old copy of Naked Lunch. There’s a path thinking minds can take. One tailors itself to society’s prescribed formats; the other does not. One is a nightmare of social acceptance and inclusion, a sharp drop into an oubliette followed by a slow ride on a creeping conveyor belt alongside mooncalves destined for the vat; the other is a lucid dream where you watch it all unfold in the valley below. Burroughs was born into the golden creeping path and broke from it with a great tearing sound. He knew what he left behind and how the larval nightmares he described could never compare to it. I only wish he had lived long enough to see the invention of a yeast that produces home brew morphine.