"The Lodger" by Drew Gummerson

This is a charming and joyous book which affirms the pleasure that can be found in the simple routines of life. There were moments when the style reminded me of 'kitchen sink' novels from the 1950s and 1960s such as The Lowlife by Alexander Baron and a couple of slim novels by Wolf Mankowitz: Make Me an Offer and A Kid for Two Farthings.

Honza, a gay man, a writer and wannabe novelist, takes a lodger to help with the bills. Andy moves in. Andy is childlike in his simple pleasures: he eats baked beans on toast, watches telly, drinks beer. Together, they look after Nicholas, Honza's little nephew: there are delightful descriptions of the innocent fun to be found entertaining children. But there are clouds on the horizon. Nicholas's mother plans to take him to London with her. Then Andy announces he has killed a man.

The plot is a slow burner. Gummerson takes his time to build up the characters. Nevertheless, I found it a page turner because of the way the author drops in little clues to keep the reader trying to solve the enigma that is Andy. It even flirts towards the end with thriller genre.

Much of the writing is unaffected and innocent. There is a significant amount of explicit gay sex, but I found that too to be (most of the time, when it was good sex) joyous.

I hardly ever laugh aloud, but there were one or two moments in this book when I could not restrain an audible chuckle. Such as when, in chapter seven, four-year-old Nicholas, having told his Mum: "Andy's having a piss" is reproved with the word: "manners" and replies "Please. Andy's having a piss. Thank you." Or, in chapter eight, when teenager Martin, having been taught how to put on a condom on a carrot and told to practise, asks to borrow a carrot because his Mum only using tinned ones. "'I didn't mean on the carrot,' says Andy." Or when in chapter fifteen, Andy goes to A&E to have a cork removed from his rectum. "'How long?' said the nurse. And held up his thumb and middle finger indicating a distance. ... 'No,' said the nurse. Deadpan. 'How long ago did it happen?'" 

Selected quotes:

• “I was beginning to realize how cold it was. I had goosebumps on my arms, legs, and was starting to suffer from cryonics of the balls.” (Ch 1)
• “This wasn't a voice that was easily mistakable. It was an inharmonious mix of Leo Sayer practising scales and a seventeenth-century castrato mid-op.” (Ch 1)
• “Queues are good places to meet people. Even the corniest of lines in a queue smacks of the naturalism of a sentence in a novel by Emile Zola.” (Ch 7)
• “As a stripper Dark Angel wasn't bad. He had the body of a gladiator, the moves of a ballerina suffering from steroid abuse. It was Schwarzenegger doing Swan Lake for the Swedish soft porn industry.” (Ch 7)
• “Showers are the casual sex of washing. No foreplay is required, no expensive offerings. You just dive in there, get what you want and then leave with barely a thankyou. Baths however require commitment.” (Ch 12)
• “Graham worked for a local newspaper. Cliches were his bread and butter.” (Ch 16)

Delightful, well-written, entertaining and heart-warming.

Drew Gummerson has also written:

• Me and Mickie James
• Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel
• Saltburn

July 2026; 331 pages

Published in 2002 by GMP

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Bilal's Bread' by Sulayman X

 Bilal has problems. He's a Kurdish Moslem immigrant in America in the aftermath of 9/11. His father was killed by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein; his family is poor, depending on the wages of his two older brothers and the bread his mother bakes. He is sixteen and coming to terms with being homosexual, something taboo in his Islamic school. Since the age of 9, he has been sexually and physically abused by his older brother, Salim, an angry and frequently violent man.

When I was about half-way through this carefully-written novel, I thought that the story was over but I was wrong. Time and again another tragic plot point punched me in the face. The tension continued until very nearly the final page. 

There was a moment towards the end when the lump in my throat and the water in my eyes made it difficult to continue (especially since I was reading it on a long train journey and I didn't want to start crying in front of the other passengers in the carriage). This book certainly carries emotional dynamite.

And yet the characterisation is, on the whole, simplistic. There are goodies (the Imam and his son, Bilal's sister Fatima) and baddies such as Bilal's headteacher. There was a moment when wicked Salim's back-story suggested he might be damaged rather than evil but that rug was swiftly pulled from under our feet. Bilal himself has a journey to make from confusion to understanding and from submission to self-assertiveness but the most interesting character by far was his mother who was the only truly complex human being depicted.

It was written in the third person mostly from Bilal's perspective but it was driven by the issues. As a result, dialogues became carefully structured explorations, with the participants making quite long and carefully reasoned speeches. This extended into Bilal's thoughts: the reader was told what was happening rather than being shown and allowed to work it out for themselves. To take a trivial example: "Whenever Hakim was drunk, he tended to get a bit emotional. He usually wanted to make sure that Bilal didn't think he was a bad person. Bilal didn't. Hakim never seemed to remember that, so they wound up having the same conversation again and again." (Ch 1) This could be shown rather than told.

Perhaps there was too much plot; had the book been more character-led it would have been slower and longer.

There are sexually explicit scenes and descriptions of violence. It felt like a YA book but perhaps best suited to the older end of that, around the sixteen years old that Bilal himself is.

But wow. I was weeping in the train. That's a testament to any book.

Selected quotes:

• "When she started talking about the old days, it meant she was tired - tired of the struggle in America. Tired of not being able to speak English, of not being able to get along properly. Tired of the daily battle just to survive." (Ch 11)
• "Muhammad stood up and began clapping. It was a solitary, forlorn sound in the auditorium." (Ch 14)

October 2025; 240 pages

Published by Alyson Books, Los Angeles in 2005

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Outline of plot: spoiler alerts:

• Salim sexually abuses younger brother Bilal including oral sex and anal rape. Emotional abuse includes threatening that if Bilal does not please Salim, Salim will fuck their little sister Fatima.
• Neighbourhood thugs bully Bilal when he is delivering bread.
• At a sleepover, Bilal has consensual gay sex with his best friend Mohammed.
• Salim discovers Bilal has been surfing gay porn at school.
• Salim thrashes Bilal and throws him out onto the streets. Bilal takes refuge with Malik, the local Imam, Mohammed's dad.
• Bilal confesses the physical abuse to Mr Malik who threatens that if Salim continues to beat Bilal, he will go to the police.
• Bilal confesses to Mr Malik that Salim rapes him.
• Salim tells Bilal that he was gang-raped by Iraqi police while their father was forced to watch. Then the dad was shot.
• Salim beats Bilal again and breaks his wrist. At the hospital, the statutory reporting procedures come into play, including anal swabs for semen, and Salim is arrested.
• Bilal's mum wants Bilal to drop the charges so that Salim can come home.
• Hakim reveals that Salim used to rape little boys back home in Iraq.
• Salim commits suicide in his cell the night before his pre-trial hearing.
• Bilal uses a poetry competition to out himself at school.

"The Gay Decameron" by Christopher Whyte

A group of gay men, mostly in pairs, gather for a dinner party in the posh Edinburgh flat of one of the couples. They reminisce about the past and tell stories. Some of them have been lovers, or have made love to someone whom someone else at the party has loved. Some of their friends are now dead, for example one committed suicide and another died from AIDS. Each of them remembers their own journey from the first realisation that they were gay to now. 

It's quite convoluted and I needed notes to keep track of who was who and who had slept with whom. Although the characters had different experiences and did different things, I didn't feel that they were sufficiently differentiated. In a way, and perhaps this was the theme of the book, they all merged into one archetypal gay experience. Not that they were all the same! Some experienced long periods of chastity, others were very promiscuous. But the basic pattern was that relationships begin tentatively, with risk, and frequently end in toxic unhappiness, but the goal is almost always a stable, loving and enduring partnership.

The one part of the book I would have junked is the fantasy story of the young lovers set somewhere in the Middle East in the middle ages. I suppose the idea was that this was a world in which gay love was accepted as everyday. But it read like soft porn and clashed with the realistic stories of modern gay life in Edinburgh (and Barcelona). 

Selected quotes:

• “A crossroads town with ramshackle buildings lining either side of the street, like drunken soldiers unexpectedly summoned to parade.” (Ch 2)
• “Sad and alone ... rattling around in this huge flat like the last biscuit left in the tin.” (Ch 11)
• “The further up the tree a monkey is, the more of its backside you get to see.” (Ch 15)
• “The further upwards in price range one goes, the more anonymous hotel rooms become.” (Ch 16)
• “Candles were hard and solid. Yet they transformed themselves into light the moment you gave them the chance.” (Ch 23)

October 2025; 346 pages

First published by Victor Gollancz in 1998

My paperback edition was issued by Indigo in 1999.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Night Listener" by Armistead Maupin

A cleverly plotted story about truth and fiction.

Gabriel Noone has become famous for reading stories on the radio - he calls them "feel-good penny dreadfuls" (Ch 2) which might be a decent description of this novel. He is contacted by Pete, a boy who has written a book about his childhood hell, sexually abused by his parents, pimped out to men, and forced to make gay porn videos. Gabriel an ageing gay man whose long-term partner has just left him, finds solace in his chats with Pete. But is this telephone relationship quite what it seems to be?

Right from the start, the narrator warns us that he is "a fabulist by trade" and that he embellishes even true stories. He warns Pete against confusing Gabriel's reality with the characters in his radio stories. So the reader knows that Gabriel is an unreliable narrator although the full extent of his duplicity is not revealed until the very end. But how much truth is there in what Pete says? Is lonely Gabriel falling for a hoax perpetrated by an even more unreliable narrator? How much do any of us really know the truth about anything?

That's why I wasn't keen on the Afterword which, rather like the final seven minutes of the film Saltburn, spills the beans with heavy explication. In the case of this book, the justification might be that, by explaining things, it leaves the reader with an even greater realisation that the author has been economical with the actuality. And at least it preserves the core ambiguity.

The plot is nicely woven with the subplot of Gabriel being abandoned by his partner Jess who is trying to 'find himself'. It's nicely paced with clever twists culminating in a snow-bound journey, a sort of Hero's quest in that otherworld Americans call up-state Michigan. I don't think I was ever surprised by a major twist - they were well-signalled and the only twist I missed I felt was an unnecessary way to crank up the tension - but my motivation to keep reading was partly because I was expecting the twist and I wanted to know whether my expectations would be confirmed. At first I was disappointed by the ending: I wanted resolution and I felt its lack was because the author himself couldn't decide which of two possibilities to endorse. On second thoughts, however, I think the ambiguous ending was probably intended from the start and I like the way it finished (though I still have my doubts about the Afterword). 

It is narrated in the first person which makes the uncertainties more visceral and the past tense. I have previously found that this author has an expectation that the reader shares his cultural milieu, for example with references to commercial products, which included, in this novel, Triscuits, the Castro, and a Rocky and Bullwinkle cel. Presumably this is done to maximise verisimilitude for his home audience but, if done too much, it can confuse and alienate those outside that target. However, I felt that in this book these were usually - and unobtrusively - explained.

The narrator-protagonist Gabriel is portrayed as someone perhaps a little too sensitive, and gullible, for his own good. The antagonist, though not in the villain sense, is Pete, whom we only know through his phone calls. He is a brilliant writer, still in his early teens. His debut book is a memoir in which he (apparently, we are given no details of this book) describes having been sexually abused from babyhood. He has had syphilis and now has AIDS. He is a fan of Gabriel, whose work he has heard on the radio, and wants Gabriel to write a blurb for his book. They start to exchange phone calls. All at once they have adopted a father (Gabriel) son (Pete) relationship. Very soon, very fast. There are some strangely intimate moments, such as when Pete wants to rest his head on Gabriel's shoulder, through the medium of the phone conversation. 

This was, for me, the book's downfall. I couldn't believe in Pete as a character. This is a lad who had been raped repeatedly, and pimped out, by his biological father and he immediately seeks to adopt the needy Gabriel as his telephone father. This is a lad who has been subjected to horrendous abuse, whose parents never even called him by his name, and yet who shows no hint of PTSD. He is portrayed as an occasionally vulnerable tough guy making jokes and trading insults. He even offers relationship advice to Gabriel, talking about love. Not only does he have a surprisingly wise head on his young shoulders, but also he sounds like a counsellor. As a character, he reminded me of Kya, the protagonist in Where the Crawdads Sing by Della Owens, another child neglected by her parents who manages to bring herself up, on her own, in the middle of a marsh, even learning to read in a single summer. In other words, Pete and Kya are too good to be true.

It seemed to me that the phone calls with Pete were a fantasy sequence set in what was otherwise a mundane and everyday description of Gabriel's problems with his boyfriend, Jess - a shadowy character whose main function seem to be to leave Gabriel broken-hearted and therefore vulnerable and, at the end of Act One, to advance the plot lurchingly into Act Two - and his wonderfully bigoted and cantankerous father. This is told with a mass of details and seemingly  unimportant incidents which underpin the verisimiltude and the feeling of ordinariness. This was the perfect counterpoint to the fantasy; it grounded and anchored it and made it seem possible.

But I was a jump ahead of the twist. 

It is very much structured in three acts. The first act is about making contact with Pete (at 8%) and the relationship becoming deeper. A big question mark arises at 37% and we move into the second act in which uncertainty is the theme. The third act is mostly the 'hero's quest' with a final twist (which I also saw coming) at the 85% mark.

It was quick and easy to read and very entertaining. The plot was cleverly constructed and I liked the theme although I'm still in two minds about the Afterword. The biggest flaw was in the antagonist.

Apparently it is based on a true story. 

Selected quotes:

• "I know how it sounds when I call him my son. ... I've noticed the looks on people's faces ... It's easy enough to see how they've pegged me: an unfulfilled man on the shady side of fifty, making a last grasp at fatherhood with somebody else's child." (Ch 1)
• "I've spent years looting my life for fiction. Like a magpie, I save the shiny stuff and discard the rest; it's of no use to me if it doesn't serve the geometry of the story." (Ch 1)
• "Most stories have holes in them that cry out for jewelled elephants." (Ch 1)
• "He'd use a ten-dollar word when a ten-cent one would do." (Ch 2)
• "There are moments, I think, when you actually feel your life changing, when all you can all but hear the clumsy clank and bang of fate's machinery." (Ch 3)
• "He'd work my nipples like a ravenous baby ... until I came with a fury, feeling the rough hemp of his chest across my belly, that silken cock against my leg, or in my astonished hand." (Ch 4)
• "His eyes were his most arresting feature: a pale, glowing green that stopped you cold with their sheer unlikelihood. Like those pretty stones you find on the beach sometimes that prove, upon closer examination, to be fragments of a pop bottle, roughed up by the ocean." (Ch 4) Even in this arresting description, the author hints that maybe not all is as it seems.
• "I spent days sifting through the litter that Wayne had left as an autobiography." (Ch 6) When my Aunt Marion died she left a cupboard full of slide transparencies showing scenes from her many holidays. It broke my heart to throw them out. Our most treasured possessions become junk after we die.
• "The heart is measured by how much you love, not by how much you are loved by others. Fuckin' Hitler was loved by others." (Ch 7) Sometimes Pete's feel-good philosophising sounds far too mature for his tender age and untender experience.
• "I had learned to jerk off earlier that year, but the experience had seemed more of a medical emergency than an act of lust." (Ch 9)
• "There were pleasant farmsteads and dark green forests and countless ponds winking through the birches like pocket mirrors." (Ch 20)
• "Is that what it means to get old? I wondered. To revert to the helplessness of infancy without any of the fun?" (Ch 25)

Maupin is famous for writing Tales of the City, a compendium of linked stories about a group of rather superficial characters in San Francisco.

July 2024; 324 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The City and the Pillar" by Gore Vidal

 Chapter One starts with Jim Willard, sitting at a table in a bar, alone, and getting drunk. This is the frame. Chapter 2 is the start of the narrative making this a story within a story, explaining what has brought Jim to this position.

Jim is gay. It is pre-war Virginia and homosexuality is so repressed that, Jim doesn't even known that he is gay; all he understands is that he fancies his friend Bob. After a weekend being boys at a log cabin in the wilderness, Bob leaves town to go to sea and Jim soon follows, searching for the man he loves. But he can't find him so he begins an extraordinary Odyssey, starting as a sailor and then becoming a tennis pro in Hollywood, slowly entering the homosexual world, becoming the kept boy of an acto and then meeting a writer, joining the army and then going to New York. Always aware that whatever impulse he has, it has to be kept secret, except from the other initiates in this sub-culture. And always searching for love, his first love, in the person of Bob Ford.

It is a simply told narrative, carefully glossing over the sex (it was published in 1948). It broke literary ground and almost made Gore Vidal unpublishable; it was read with appreciation by Thomas Mann. There are moments when it falters: for example, there is a professor and a writer at a 'faggot party' discussing homosexuality in what strays from being the sort of conversation you might have at a party into a written academic debate. But mostly it is on the money.

Of course it helps that the protagonist Jim is incredibly innocent to the point of stupidity and so all-American (a very good looking tennis professional); it means that he can be educated by the more experienced homosexuals he meets; it makes him a sort of blank sheet everyman who can be shaped by experience. The innocence and the repression are also representative of the time. But the theme of the young American boy struggling to accept himself as a homosexual is very much better done by James Baldwin in Giovanni's Room. But that was written in 1956 and (probably necessarily) set in Paris. As for John Rechy's City of Night, the fictionalised memoirs of a frent boy, that was publsihed in 1963. It was a steep trajectory and it still took years. The City and the Pillar paved the way and for that it should be celebrated.

The City is, I suppose, Sodom, one of the Cities of the Plain in Genesis, and refers to Jim's experiences in LA and NY, and the Pillar refers to the pillar of salt that Lot's wife turned into because she looked back when she fled from Sodom and, I think, refers to the final terrible scene.

It is a little dated in its use of words which might give offence nowadays.

Some great moments:

• "It makes a man so horny he could lay a mule, if it would just stand still." (2.3) Terrible foreshadowing.
• "He realized it would be a difficult matter to live in a world of men and women without participating in their ancient and necessary duet." (3.2)
• "You're not like the rest of us who want a mirror." (5.1)
• "Tag ends of scripts tended to work their way into his conversation." (5.1)
• "Primitives don't seem to mind what they do if it's fun." (5.2)
• "If a man wants to be accepted by a barracks, he must listen to a great deal of talk about a very few subjects, and he must accept as a law of nature that, whenever a point is made, it will be repeated a hundred times, often in the same words, rather like part-singing." (7.2)
• "I have such hopes for the afterlife. I see it as a riot of color! And all the angels will look like marines. Too gay!" (9.1)
• "Trade was regarded with great suspicion; in fact, it was a part of the homosexual credo that this year's trade is next year's competition." (9.1)
• "At his feet the water rose and fell slowly, gently, like the breathing is some vast monster." (11) 
• "The purpose of rivers is to flow into the sea." (11)

A ground-breaking novel. September 2020; 186 pages

Also written by Vidal and reviewed in this blog: Kalki

Vidal also wrote some classics of American fiction such as Burr, and Lincoln,

"The Reluctant Camboy" by Bella Bliss

 I wanted a book that gave me some sort of insight into the feelings of a man who performs sex acts in front of a webcam for the pleasure of those watching over the internet. Why? Because I am writing about such a character in my next novel. I thought that a sociological fact-finding mission might give me less insight into the inner feelings of such a performer than a work of fiction.

I bought the wrong book. The Reluctant Camboy is a work of gay erotic fantasy fiction which crosses over the boundary into fairly hardcore porn. I should have guessed from the author's name.

The hero, a gay man, is persuaded by his foster brother to make money as a webcam performer to cover foster brother's debts. Two friends-cum-lovers (pun intended) agree to assist. Gay sex is described in graphic detail. Character building is minimal, motivation also minimal. 

It's extremely short and I read it in less than an hour.

I imagine that it fulfils the requirements of those readers who bought it knowing what it would provide. I wanted something more like the true story in Cam Boy by J Matt.

"The Ticket that Exploded" by William Burroughs

Again Burroughs uses the cut-up technique to scatter images of gay sex, hanging, drug addiction, poverty, warfare, telepathy, and insect and crustacean life through what you might call a plot. Again we meet some of his favourite characters, including Carl, and Agent Lee.

For several pages the cut-up technique involves cutting out a few words of the lyrics of a variety of love songs, some inevitably used more than once, and splicing them together. This causes some interesting curious such as "Got you under my skin on my mind." (p 35) and I suspect there are some who will celebrate the postmodern irony that makes love look so repetitive and yet so unique at the same time ... or is it trying to tell us that the creative process is merely remixing and that originality is dead? Hmmm.

"(ironically the format is banal to its heart of pulp ambivalently flailing noneffectual tentacles of verbal diarrhea)" (p22). Quite.

The plot seems to revolve around the potential of tape recordings played in some sort of synchrony to cause people to hang themselves but it is also mixed up with an intergalactic virus that seems to take the form of street boys. Or have I got that wrong? It was difficult to work out what was going on and even harder to care.

Despite Burroughs being an American author Agent Lee meets 'Genial' a drug addicted gay assassin, in Boots the Chemist in Piccadilly London; Boots of Piccadilly was famous in the 1960s as being the all-night chemist where addicts could fulfil their scripts; I wonder if it still is?

More than with any other Burroughs book (the others I have linked to from this post are quite good) the reader needs to tolerate a certain amount of being taken for a ride for the occasional nuggets of poetic beauty: either a perfect phrase, or an interesting idea, or a wonderful image:

• "it was across the table raw and bloody as a fresh used knife." (p 1)
• "who am I to be critical few things in my own past I'd just as soon forget." (p 2); Burroughs has a nice way of subverting grammar while leaving the sense entirely clear
• "Winds of time" (p 5)
• "The two beings twisted free of human coordinates" (p 6)
• "You can run a government without police if your conditioning program is tight enough but you can't run a government without bull shit." (p 15)
• "The dreamer with dirty cheeks" (p 52)
• "These our actors bid you peaceful opaqueness in this monument of tiredness." (p 135)
• "John stood there with a cup of coffee late morning sunlight in his eyes." (p 143)

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• The Wild Boys
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded

April 2017; 168 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs

Naked lunch? William Burroughs remembers Jack Kerouac as coming up with the title and he himself didn't understand it at first but now he says that it is "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". Jack Kerouac remembers it as being entitled when Allen Ginsberg was reading it aloud and misread 'naked lust' (which never made the final text).

This book starts well, with an account of a junkie evading capture by the Narcotics police by jumping on a subway train. But the text at the start is pocked with explanatory notes woven into the text. Nevertheless, some of Burroughs razor sharp images come through.

But then the book degenerates. It becomes a procession of rude remarks about women, black people, Arabs, religions: Burroughs seems to be trying his hardest to offend everyone he can. He is obsessed with shit, there is the usual smattering of gay sex (reprising the idea in the Soft Machine that men ejaculate when they are hanged), and as with the soft machine he has a morbid fascination with insects and crustacea. And after the first few pages, the crystal observations seem to have deserted him, although there is a late stand. "It's a wildly unpretty spectacle" (p 177)

This is the book in which Steely Dan makes an appearance (there are three of them, they refer to robust metal dildoes). In this part, Burroughs becomes interested in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and I wondered with John Livingstone Lowes would have made of Burroughs had he analysed his work rather than that of Coleridge in his study of the imagination, The Road to Xanadu.

Although Naked Lunch is hailed as a prime example of the Burroughs 'cut-up' technique, where he supposedly wrote narratives and then chopped them up so that scenes and characters recur, this book has this technique less obviously than The Wild Boys, my favourite Burroughs so far, and The Soft Machine though it is done with rather more effect than in The Ticket that Exploded. Rather, it is assembled into vignettes in which one character or one theme is briefly explored. In the book, Burroughs claims that "You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point" (p 187)(although the book is structured in that the cop chase at the beginning is mirrored by a similar scene very near the end) and "There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing ... I am a recording instrument ... I don not presume to impose 'story' 'plot' 'continuity'" (p 184). I thought the book was summed up in another quote: "Vast adolescent muttering." (p 98)

Nevertheless, the book does have some fascinating moments. Burroughs had a vivid if diseased imagination and there are some ideas that make me want to write a story about them. Here are some other moments where the observation was acute, or the concepts original, or he was just funny:

• "Fingers of rotten ectoplasm" (p 5)
• "You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them?" (p 6)
• "I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants - a body" (p 8)
• "mosaic of sleepless nights" (p 9)
• "Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat. The Mark Inside ..." (p 11) 
• "the threat of torture is used to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved." (p 21)
• "Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand ..." (p 56)
• "Guess he can make his own penicillin" (p 60)
• "ribs you could wash your filthy overalls on" (p 85)
• "Sucking terror from needle scars" (p 194)

But when all is said and done, it wasn't his best. July 2016; 196 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Page references refer to the paperback of the restored text edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles and published by Fourth Estate in 2010

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• The Wild Boys
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded