Simon's Reviews > Junky

William Burroughs must be high up on my list of good writers whose influence I find largely to be for the worse: While I actually like quite a few authors obviously inspired by him, I'm also quite certain that if it weren't for old Bill a good chunk of the Western world's high culture wouldn't have turned into a tiresome contest in who can be more cynical and incomprehensible than each other. Despite all this, even his relatively conventional debut novel has aged very well and lost little to none of its power!

In fact, I'd call "Junky" more readable than not just something like the author's multi-directional psychedelic mindfuck of a magnum opus "Naked Lunch" but also most of what I've read from the likes of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Hunter S. Thompson. At least that's the case if you can stomach the subject matter. Then again, I consider Wm. Burroughs' greatest strength how good he was at making the reader uncomfortable and laugh out loud during the same paragraph... then afterwards make them think for weeks about what they've just read. I must say that I find his description of heroin withdrawal ten times more terrifying than any horror fiction I've read, precisely because there's so very little sensationalism or moralizing included. Likewise, the gallows humour is effective because how deadpan the delivery is, and arises naturally from the situations described.

Another reason "Junky" has aged very well is how useful the book is as a time capsule. It was written at the dawn of the drug culture in America in its current form, and there's another larger story told here than that of the protagonist: The paradigm shift the social subcultures surrounding drug addiction went through during the Eisenhower era, from its pre-WW2 shape most familiar to my generation from the 1930's pulp fiction and exploitation films to what "drug culture" means today. You can really tell here that the author was a trained anthropologist!