The Place of Dead Roads

William Burroughs’s 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, who sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America. Fantastic and humorous, The Place of Dead Roads continues Burroughs’s exploration of society’s controlling forces – the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs – with a style utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.