"Cities of the Red Night" is a book of limited but, for its own happy few, intense appeal. Opium addicts who are sexually aroused by witnessing and/or enacting garrotings and hangings will find "Cities" a veritable gallows of delight…. Guided by Ix Tab, a jealous goddess, Mr. Burroughs has eliminated from his book everything incidental to the central task of spinning and respinning the same yarn—characterization, wit, stylistic graces, anything that might detract from the erotic fascination of death by hanging. Even the romance of heroin addiction, which offered an alternative Universal Metaphor to interpreters of "Naked Lunch," has dwindled to a few rather pro forma evocations of his new drug of preference, opium. In this book drugs are merely a means to an end, and that end is the gallows….

Mr. Burroughs's eternal tale is told in varying modes. Sometimes it is a fantasy of...