CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT

'''Cities of the Red Night''' is a novel by beat author William S. Burroughs that was first published in 1981 (his first new full-length novel since ''The Wild Boys'' a decade earlier). It is the first in a trilogy and is followed by ''The Place of Dead Roads'' and ''The Western Lands''. The plot of this somewhat disjunctive work revolves around a group of revolutionary homosexual opiate addict sorcerers who seek the freedom to live as they will, while a supernatural disease spreads across the world. The events described occur across vast expanses of time and space, as characters travel through time, though confusing to some the few references to character feeling like they're falling as they become unhooked from time gives adequate explanation. Interzone, Burroughs transspatial transtemporal space, where everything cuts into everything else, seems to be the medium through which this travel is made possible. Here also an important part of Burroughs mature Mythology is described with the Six Cities of the Red Night: Tamaghis, Ba'dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana, and Ghadis. One must make the Pilgrimage through all six cities which is said to take multiple lifetimes. Each reveals a different permutation of the famous aphorism of Hassan i Sabbah: "Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted." Amusingly the second city is exactly like America. The Cities possibly exist in Interzone as they seem to transcend space and time.
The cover art for the 1981 Holt-Rinehart-Winston first edition is Pieter Brueghel the Elder's 1562 painting "The Triumph of Death".