by William S. Burroughs
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Product Description
The Wild Boys is a futuristic tale of global warfare in which a guerrilla gang of boys dedicated to freedom battles the organized armies of repressive police states. Making full use of his inimitable humor, wild imagination, and style, Burroughs creates a world that is as terrifying as it is fascinating.
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Average Customer Review:
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 To Disturb Your Sleep, 2008-02-04
I was something of an innocent when I read The Wild Boys and it gave me nightmares. The staccato, choppy plot is too disjointed to ever really allow anything to come to a close so the images tend to remain in some vestibule of the brain and come spilling out at night when your poor consciousness tries to form them into some kind of completeness.
The images themselves are sometimes gruesome and you can almost sense Burroughs' lunatic energy and all his wild imaginings spilling out on the page and being herded-somewhat unsuccessfully- into the form of a novel. Some people will have trouble with the homosexual imagery, but almost everyone will be haunted to some extent by the casual eroticization of death and cruelty-I think the Mayan sequences are some of the most persistent.
But this is not mere incoherent pornography, there is a wild, energetic beauty and an almost religious devotion to wontonly intense experience that is-along with WSB's poetic style-unforgettable.
Lynn Hoffman, author of the much-less disturbing bang BANG: A Novel and the downright soothing New Short Course in Wine,The
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Pretty standard for a post-Naked Lunch Burroughs novel, 2004-12-29
Burroughs is basically a love-him-or-leave-him writer. Using a slightly more lucid version of his "cut-up" style, The Wild Boys is a book about a group of, well, wild boys rising up in the face of a very oppressive society. Yes, there is lots of sex, most of it homosexual, but once past that Burroughs shows some interesting sociological insight. Burroughs is a satirist at heart, and in this case he is clearly on the Boys' side as he tries to "expose" the bedroom lives of the Moral Majority. However, Wild Boys brings more with a clear message to rebel against these oppressive forces and enjoy life.
We begin the book with glimpses of the corruption of the oppressing classes in a fantastical estate resembling a strange Neverland ranch. Rich people are invited to a long stay by the host where they eat, hangglide, and have sex. The starving masses are locked outside and taunted by the estate staff.
Then, we move on to the Boys' who also have their own bizzare society, but Burroughs tries hard to write it in a much more positive light. Ritualistic and spiritual, the Boys band together and fight back for their freedom.
Burroughs adds some interesting styles to the mix. Color plays a huge role and are often used to describe characters and places. Many times whole pages are nothing more than the same passage in slightly different variations written repeatedly. Sometimes these experimentations are interesting, other times they are tiresome. The plot, such as it is, starts and stops throughout the book. Some of the chapters are quite lucid and describe the war between the millitary and the Wild Boy tribes; other chapters, and the basic theme in these repeats, deal only with a few characters as they throw caution to the wind and succumb to their homosexual desires.
While this may not be the best Burroughs novel I've read, it's certainly memorable. There is a lot to discover here, but some may not be willing to wade through the uneven style or sex to find it.
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Armed and dangerous, 2004-03-05
This novel reminds me of Kevin Esser's Dance of the Warriors and of the Venezuelan movie Sicario. They all deal with worlds in which gangs of teenagers are engaged in violence and sex. This is the best of the three. It is disturbing and is not for the conventional, and certainly not for the bleeding-heart types who want the United Nations to abolish the use of boys in war. Only Burroughs could have written it. The style is as unconventional as the theme. This is a world in which morality does not exist.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
"Time to move into first place...", 2004-01-26
A square - a story inside other stories - the interaction of ghosts with the living - and the living with being reborn.This was the first Burroughs I'd read. It read like a series of short stories connected like a poem. Burroughs language flows then stutters and then squares back on itself. The way he experiments with the sound and repetition of words - was exciting and something I find I do in my own writing. I found myself keeping track of themes - St. Louis, and green (Greenbaum, Green Inn, Green Nun, Greenfield, Green Hat), and a constant reference to 1920. I haven't read much biography on Burroughs; that should come next. Burroughs exploration of a future that becomes more primitive even as it advances, his unabashed and open erotic descriptions as a consequence of his future rather than as an expected sidetrip, and his clean and no holds barred language require that I read more of his work.
16 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
 You All Are Beatnik Sheep, 2003-01-06
Quite simply this was the most tastless and ignorant piece of literature I have ever read. It seemed as if the book felt like convoluting any actual storyline with scenes of gratuitous and repetive sex. Is it just me or does everyone in this damned book seem to carry a tin of vaseline? I thought there were some interesting parts but, call me a prude or an ignorant little ... but I think this book was riding on the current of the Naked Lunch which has been the wave on which Burroughs had carried his wrinkly disgusting body upon. This book is pretty much like a David Lynch film. No one gets it, they just talk about it and pretend that they do so they look intelligent but quite simply they are just beatnik sheep ready for slaughter by the corporate identity you have tried so hard to avoid with your lies and propaganda of free intellectual thought, which is disguising your true ignorance and gullibility
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