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.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ lifelong obsession with disease – particularly cancer and viruses – as a central metaphor in his critique of power, control, and modernity. Polina Mackay and James Mackay argue that Burroughs’ engagement with medicine, from his early syphilis diagnosis to his interest in Wilhelm Reich’s unorthodox theories, shaped his representation of illness as both literal and ideological contagion. From Junky to Naked Lunch, the cut-up texts, and Blade Runner: A Movie, Burroughs portrays medical institutions and bureaucracies not as healing forces but as agents of repression, manipulation, and decay. The chapter shows how Burroughs’ writing fuses Reichian thought, alternative medicine, and paranoid systems theory into a distinctive epidemiology of language, addiction, and social control. While his metaphoric conflation of disease and power reveals the limits of postwar biopolitics, it also risks collapsing critical inquiry into conspiracy. Ultimately, Burroughs’ viral imagination oscillates between incisive cultural diagnosis and reactionary anxiety, offering a vision of medicine as both metaphor and battleground.

This chapter revisits the legal and cultural legacy of Naked Lunch, tracing its trajectory from an outlaw text at the center of a landmark obscenity trial to a canonized modernist classic – and back again to contested status in the context of contemporary book bans. Loren Glass reflects on the enduring influence of the 1966 legal exoneration of Naked Lunch, arguing that its victory relied on disavowing the very queer and obscene qualities that characterize its content. Through comparisons to current legislative efforts Glass highlights the persistence of moral panic around sexual representation, particularly as it relates to LGBTQ identities. The chapter probes the paradoxes at the heart of literary freedom, including the right not to read, and considers Naked Lunch’s fraught place in classrooms today. Ultimately, it calls for re-situating Burroughs’ work on the margins, where its destabilizing, subversive power can be more fully acknowledged – and responsibly engaged.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ fraught engagement with queerness, colonialism, and nationalism across such key texts as Queer, The Yage Letters, Naked Lunch, and The Wild Boys. Drawing on Oliver Harris’ and Alex Wermer-Colan’s insights into Burroughs’ overidentification with imperial tropes, Carmody argues that Burroughs simultaneously critiques and reappropriates colonial discourse through a queer lens. Through grotesque, parodic routines, Burroughs exposes the libidinal underpinnings of American exceptionalism and neocolonialism. Carmody situates Burroughs’ postwar expatriate writing – especially in 1950s Tangier – as emblematic of a nostalgic yet radical vision for a postnational community, rooted in aesthetic freedom and sexual plurality. Highlighting the transformation from colonial critique to postcolonial fantasy, Carmody demonstrates how Burroughs reimagines the colony as a site of anarchic potential, rather than nationalist redemption. The chapter ultimately suggests that Burroughs’ literary project is less a political blueprint than an unstable, generative terrain where queer desire and imperial critique intersect.

Despite being a writer who was celebrate for transcending the written word to work in multiple forms of media, Burroughs remains underrecognized for his contributions to the art of cinema, especially as a screenwriter. This chapter explores the history of Burroughs’ engagement with cinema, highlighting his neglected, and unrealized, screenplays from the late 1960s and 1970s. After exploring his 1960s collaborations with Antony Balch on the cut-up films, Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups, this chapter traces the arc of Burroughs’ screenwriting, from his earliest film treatment, “Twilights Last Gleamings,” his closet screenplay, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, his screen adaptation of his novel, The Wild Boys, and his screenplay, Blade Runner: A Movie. After situating these works within the changing field of American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s, this chapter considers Burroughs’ theoretical contributions to screenwriting in his lectures on the subject at the City College of New York and Naropa College in the mid-1970s. Through this overview of Burroughs’ screenwriting and thinking, this chapter argues that Burroughs’ remains neglected for offering a valuable vision of an alternate cinema at a crucial time in American culture and history.

This chapter charts the rise of the Beat novel by tracing an arc from Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, to Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. The chapter discusses a range of novels, from George Mandel's Flee the Angry Strangers and Chandler Brossard’s Who Walk in Darkness, to Kerouac’s On the Road and Visions of Cody, and Burroughs’s Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch.