William Burroughs’ avid consumption of pulp magazines in his youth led to his discovery of H. P. Lovecraft, whose influence would impart a distinctive set of horror devices to Burrough’s writing. Naked Lunch displays these devices with remarkable vividness, giving graphic expression to the key horror tropes of interstitiality and impurity. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject provides a useful interpretive tool to assess the effect of these tropes, enabling a reading of Naked Lunch that identifies the disintegration of selfhood as its central concern. Using repeated images of bodily fluids and monstrosity, Naked Lunch excavates the anxiety of being a gay drug addict in the normative 1950s. In the process, both the reader and the narrator undergo abjection through the visceral language and profoundly fragmented narrative voice. Naked Lunch represents a redeployment of Lovecraftian horror that helped to create the body horror of the 1980s.