The Interzone is the International Zone in Tangier, Morocco where William Burroughs lived for a time after his accidental shooting of his wife while stupendously high caused him to leave Mexico in something of a hurry. The time that Burroughs spent living in Tangier was greatly influential in the development of his writing style and subject matter and so it is fitting that Interzone is the title of this excellent collection of his early short stories. Interzone features many of the characters and concepts that would be developed more fully in Burroughs’ more famous works such as Nova Express and the seminal Naked Lunch. Although the quality of the stories collected in Interzone is rather variable, the collection is immensely important as marking the turning point from the more traditional first-person style of Burroughs’ earlier novels like Junky and Queer to his later, more experimental works.

Interzone is divided into three distinct sections, the first of which being simply called Stories. Perhaps the most notable of the Stories is “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” which was originally written in 1938 in collaboration with Burroughs’ childhood friend Kells Elvins and is widely accepted as being his first attempt at fiction. Although the story as it appears here in Interzone is a copy from memory of the original, it is still the most complete version of the original that was written by Burroughs and Elvins after they were inspired by hearing about the sinking of the ship the Morro Castle. The majority of Burroughs’ stories are autobiographical to a certain extent, sometimes very disturbingly so. This is particularly true in the case of “The Finger”, a fictionalised account of how Burroughs came to deliberately cut off the last joint of his little finger in an effort to impress a young man in 1939 and how the episode led to a brief spell in a psychiatric hospital. Of the rest of the Stories “The Junky’s Christmas” is perhaps the best and most poignant, telling as it does the story of Danny the Car Wiper, a young junky desperate to score a hit on Christmas Day. The full line-up of Stories is:

• Twilight’s Last Gleamings
• The Finger
• Driving Lesson
• The Junky’s Christmas
• Lee and the Boys
• In the Café Central
• Dream of the Penal Colony
• International Zone

The second section of Interzone is entitled Lee’s Journals and is a further grouping of short stories, this time all written as the first-person recollections of Burroughs’ alter ego William Lee. The musings of Lee’s Journals were assembled from letters written by Burroughs to Alan Ginsberg and from notes he wrote in an attempt to find his own literary voice and to record his time in Tangier. The journals are particularly interesting for the insight that they give to Burroughs’ own struggle and attempts to define himself and to develop his writing, some of the included entries were even written while Burroughs was undergoing heroin cures at Benchimal Hospital, and for the sometimes vicious characterisations of Burroughs’ real-life friends and enemies. The entries in Lee’s Journals are:

• Lee’s Journals
• An Advertising Short for Television
• Antonio the Portuguese Mooch
• Displaced Fuzz
• Spare Ass Annie
• The Dream Cops
• The Conspiracy
• Iron Wrack Dream
• Ginsberg Notes

WORD was originally written as part of the Naked Lunch manuscript but since only a few passages survived into the final draft, it is included in Interzone as a novella making up the third section. WORD is particularly significant as, out of all the material collected in Interzone, it best shows the complete transformation that Burroughs’ work underwent as his writing shifted from the conventional to ‘the manic, surreal, wilfully disgusting and violently purgative regurgitation of seemingly random images’. Interestingly, although WORD marked a turning point in Burroughs’ career from which he would never retreat, it’s tone and style are quite unique since he never again went quite so far as to produce such a profane, sometimes incomprehensible, word soup.

Although Junky and Queer were written earlier, it is only through reading Interzone that it is possible to get a true sense of the development of William Burroughs’ literary style and to gain an insight into the genesis of his greatest works, particularly his masterpiece Naked Lunch.

Also getting the Penguin Modern Classics treatment on 27^th August are William Burroughs’ The Cat Inside, Letters 1945 – 1959 and My Education: A Book of Dreams.

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