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Published August 2nd, 2026 from Vancouver, Canada
Cities of the Red Night is the feverish wet dream of a dying teenager who has some really screwed up fetishes. William S Burroughs was a gay paedophile heroin addict obsessed with black magic, and this book is exactly what you would expect somebody like him to write. Everything can be solved with heroin, hanging, or magical sex. Erotic asphyxiation draws a wandering soul back into the body. A young gunsmith makes a technological breakthrough whilst being anally penetrated by his best friend. An outlaw band of elite boy-assassins rise up against an empire of mutants by inducing heroin withdrawals in their eunuch slave-soldiers.
The book is nonlinear, dreamlike, and connected more by symbolism and imagery than conventional plot throughlines. The first two thirds of the book are divided between two time periods: a psychic detective mystery in the late 20th century involving mysterious sexual strnagulations of boys on multiple continents, and a crew of polyamorous gay anarchist pirates in the Age of Sail waging an insurgency against the Spanish Empire. In the book's last third, these two plotlines are mostly sidelined in favour of a time-travelling space opera revolving around the titular 'Cities of the Red Night', which existed 100,000 years ago in the modern-day Gobi Desert. There's a lot of whacky sci-fi worldbuilding involving sperm extraction gangs, cabarets culminating in sexual hangings, genetically modified slaves, and fatal chemsex— typical stuff. The plot thrust of this section deals with a gender war between a slaving evil empire of female White aristocrats (created from an alien virus) and their eunuch servants, and a rag-tag, racially heterogenous gang of outlaw boys. There's also time travel and an Old West bit. Linking these disparate settings, the same characters reappear throughout as reincarnations and doppelgangers, as well as shadowy inversions of the same places and events.
Cities is the most deranged book I've ever read. Burroughs is rarely booked as a Queer writer, but there's a lot here for the ketamine transsexuals. I think we're all familiar with the cottagecore fantasy of Queer communes where everyone sings songs and repairs bikes together all evening. Cities captures that same theme of using alternative sexuality to create a utopian community, but with a very different edge. It's the dark, horny, and crucially—gay male—mirror to the sanitised image of the lesbian commune. Burroughs is alongside Dennis Cooper and Bret Easton Ellis in this tradition of unapologetically libidinal gay male writing. Cities' 'utopia' is a world full of conflict; even within their mannerbund gangs, the teenage boys throughout this novel are constantly murdering and brutalising each other. The ever-present sex and sexuality throughout the book is never idealised or abstracted. Desire takes on a quite literally viral quality which warps the body, propelling the characters forward through a world which operates on lusty dream-logic. Death is everywhere, and it is usually grisly— ejaculating during strangulation, shitting yourself in heroin withdrawal, being mutated beyond recognition by an erogenous virus. The magical rituals throughout the book have the opposite of a yonic, balance-seeking, natural Wicca vibe. Magic in the Burroughsworld is driven by a Nietzschean sex drive, filled with dark Gods thriving on the extremes of sensation, a profound sense of danger, and a grotesque epicurean sensibility. The result is a utopia which is elides the universalism that term often suggests. This is a world of wild, unstoppable gay teenage boys who never grow old. Interestingly, despite being a pederast, there isn't a clear Burroughs stand-in throughout the book. Adult men feature throughout the book, and young boys are described with a distant leering quality, but almost all of the sexual action (and by extension, the creative action and forward-motion) of the book is between partners of the same age range. Cities does not pass the Bechdel test. About half the women in the book are later revealed to be transvestite boys (make of that what you will). The other half are slaving harpy tyrants, or broodmares for the anarchist pirates, who are so repulsed by them they can only be impregnated during elaborate sex-theatre. There are hints throughout at something that could be called 'Transness'. Transvestite characters change pronouns, and at one point a boy's penis is assigned she/her pronouns and called María. But these transformations are tactical and elusive— it is, ultimately, a boy's world.
If you can stomach the content, I would really recommend Cities of the Red Night. Despite its weirdness, I found it a very breezy read, in no small part because the style is essentially that of a pulp novel. Other reviews I have skimmed say that the book has an 'icky' feeling to it, like you are growing unclean whilst reading it. Personally, I found the experience dizzying and intoxicating, like falling into a waking dream. I think there is more than cheap thrill here; Burroughs hits on genuine truths about the libidinal nature of creation and what it might mean to view death not as finality, but through the prism of sensuality. It is a book that feels raw and very human.
"I interviewed everyone I could find in the address book. I talked to waiters and bartenders all over the SoHo area: Jerry was a nice boy... polite... poised... a bit reserved. None of them had an inkling of his double life as a coke pusher and homosexual transvestite."
"Exactly: Servants. Dupes. Hired killers, paid off with a special form of death. You will recognise the rite as the Egyptian sunset rite dedicated to Set. A sacrifice involving both sex and death is the most potent projection of magical intention. The participants did not know that one of the intentions they were projecting was their own death in a plane crash."
"Jerry's spirit has got into my assistant. Only you can call him out."
"Why me?"
"Jerry's spirit has to obey you because you fuck him the best."
"We often work naked in the Governor's bedroom, seeing the maps with our whole bodies, performing ritual copulations in front of the maps, animating the maps with our sperm. The key map is Big Picture, showing the present area of occupation from Cartagena on the Atlantic seaboard to the Pearl Islands in the Pacific and northwards to a point a hundred miles north of Panama City."
"Then one night, the Krup men in every dorm get up before dawn and took down all the pinup girls. Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light forty-eight naked boys fucking, sucking, rimming on a red, white, and blue gallows and some awful Nordic shit Krup laps up like a cat, the boy singing his swan song in a mountain lake full of swans who convoy him reverently to the gallows. You don't have to be a space expert, just a tech sergeant, to see the old navy game is in operation—how one faction gets another out to slide in their own boys."