I think if I had ever done drugs (aside from alcohol, which I enjoy swimming in from time to time), I’d have ‘gotten’ this book more.  I thought Junky was a masterpiece - a rambling, meandering and crazy book but excellent all the same.  I’d heard from many a source that Naked Lunch (actually a mistake as it had originally gone under the heading of Naked Lust) was Burroughs’ seminal work.  The Big Daddy.  The dog’s bollocks.

I finished it today and I still don’t have a bloody clue what it was about.   I know there were characters and that they were doing things alongside the surreal, monstrous and mad imagery, but I can’t recollect a plot.  It was visceral, naked, arousing on many levels and twisted from one drug-daze to another.  If you want to read a cult ‘classic’ and come away a bit changed but with no idea of what the hell you just read, give this book a look-in.

Funnily enough, I found the extra stuff in the back (letters by Burroughs, notes on the book,  a critical review and a paper he wrote taken from The British Journal of Addiction Vol53)  far more interesting than the story itself.  Just not my cup of tea, it seems.  Glad to have pulled it off the ‘to read’ pile at last, though.

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