Books like The Place of Dead Roads

In The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs takes a detour through the American Old West, beginning with the 1899 death of writer/gunslinger Kim Carsons in a Colorado shootout. From there the story unfolds in a nonlinear telling of Kim’s past experience -- across vast swaths of time and space, under various forms and guises -- as professional assassin and prominent member of “The Johnson Family” (incidentally, the novel’s original title). The Johnsons are a brotherhood of honorable thieves and other itinerants who play Robin Hood to the rapacious Sherif of Nottingham represented by the Immortality Control Board of Venus and their unwitting minions in government, religion, and other organizations of Earthly control. As might be expected, the goal of the Venusian conspiracy is to prevent our souls from ever reaching the Western Lands and the genuine immortality that awaits therein, keeping us forever trapped in a scheme of systematic vampirism that, like the serfdoms of medieval times and the wage slavery common to most modern states, is far from symbiotic in nature. In Kim’s words:"We’re not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It’s ours and we’re going to take it. And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog."The ancient Egyptians pioneered the preservation of the physical body and protection of the immortal soul through a marriage of science and the arcane, but compared to what Kim has in mind, their methods were crude and uncivilized at best. To begin with, mummification was something that only the obscenely rich could ever hope to afford, thus putting this route to immortality in direct conflict with Kim’s own aims. But even if this privilege were equally available to all members of society, the logistics involved in shielding each and every mummy from the elements, vandals, and inevitable nuclear war were far too staggering to even consider. Besides, where on Earth would they even find the space to store them all?Unlike the pharaohs and their obsession with securing impregnable tombs underground, or the astronauts and their insistence on having their entire “awkward life process encapsulated and transported [with them] into Space”, Kim searches for a way that we might ditch our flawed form altogether on our way through the cosmos and the six cities between us and the Western Lands. He considers the human body to be the prison that keeps us stuck in our inescapable cycle of sex and death, one which only furthers the aims of those feeding off our vital life energies. Therefore, just:"[a]s a prisoner serving a life sentence can think only of escape, so Kim takes for granted that the only purpose of his life is space travel. [...] The alien medium we glimpse beyond Time is Space. And that is where we are going. [...] Kim considers that immortality is the only goal worth striving for. He knows that it isn’t something you just automatically get for believing some nonsense or other like Christianity or Islam. It is something you have to work and fight for, like everything else in this life or another."Though vanished from this Earth now for over one hundred thousand years already, the cities may yet exist on other planes and planets, after all. And if a soul is able to project itself through space as well as time, no longer encumbered by its physical vessel, then its odds of locating the first station on the pilgrimage (Tamaghis) go from infinitesimal to infinite. For now anyway, the rest of us remain permanently earthbound and stranded, wandering through countless lives forever, somewhere along the dead roads:‘‘And what is a dead road? Well, señor, somebody you used to meet, uno amigo, tal vez....” Remember a red brick house on Jane Street? Your breath quickens as you mount the worn red-carpeted stairs.... The road to 4 calle Larachi, Tangier, or 24 Arundle Terrace in London? So many dead roads you will never use again ... a flickering gray haze of old photos ... pools of darkness in the street like spilled ink ... a dim movie marquee with smoky yellow bulbs ... red-haired boy with a dead-white face. The guide points to a map of South America. “Here, señor ... is the Place of Dead Roads.”On to The Western Lands.