One of William Burroughs's many gifts is to employ the methods of caricature by exaggerating essential traits, and yet to avoid a two-dimensional effect. Readers who previously have been scared off only by Burroughs's experiments with language, scissors and paste, have nothing to fear from Cities of the Red Night, which is written entirely in straight-forward English, much of it the spare, Hammett-like prose of Junky and parts of Naked Lunch…. [In] the last few years Burroughs has repeated himself with increasing tedium, altering only the intensity of his apocalyptic fantasies and his sci-fi porn: almost everything now contains references to Mayan codices and page after page of boys with sudden erections which other boys put to instant use.

The plot of Cities of the Red Night takes place in two time dimensions, the 18th century and the present, which occasionally overlap so that characters from one turn...