The Western Lands

The Western Lands is a novel by William S. Burroughs, published in 1987 and the last book of a trilogy that begins with Cities of the Red Night and continues with The Place of Dead Roads.

The title refers to the western bank of the Nile, which in Egyptian mythology is the land of the dead. The book takes its inspiration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and explores the after-death state through dream scenarios, hallucinatory passages, talismanic magic, occultism and superstition.

The prose moves back and forth between the author's characters and episodes clearly drawn from his own life. One of his many alter egos is an ageing novelist called William Seward Hall, who lives alone with his cats in a boxcar by the river and has been suffering from writer's block for nearly thirty years. The two strands are not kept separate from each other.

Like most of Burroughs's fiction the book does not follow a linear narrative, and the surrealistic episodes that make it up are often irreverent in tone.