Just as The Western Lands is the third book in a triad that signals the return to a more traditional form of narrative after the experiments of the Space Age trilogy, the methods of characterization that Burroughs utilized there also mark a return, but one that reaches back toward the kind of pulp-fiction characterizations that Burroughs employed in Junkie (1953), his first novel. This is not to say that his now familiar method of making the authorial consciousness of the novel a major autobiographical reference has been discarded. Rather, he has augmented that approach by developing additional narrative tracks that follow the activities of three distinct "characters" who are also aspects of his psyche: Joe the Dead, Kim Carsons, and Horus Neferti. These three characters are described from a third-person omniscient perspective that tends to separate them from the authorial consciousness — a kind of displacement that does not...