Starting off with The Orange Eats Creeps, I think that it is best to explain what the overall story of the book is. The book is about a roaming "Slutty Hobo Junkie Vampire" that wanders through America having sex for money in 7-11s and going to a lot of underground punk concerts (which may or may not feature the infamous G.G Allin). The style of the novel is reminiscent of the cut-up method and even Thomas Pynchon's long and beautiful sentences.
The book seems to wander from subject to subject not being able to find a place to stay still in which matches the overall "Hobo" idea of the novel. The main character continues to shift through her memories and sometimes through the influence of drugs, the memories of others. (She has this ability where she could see the thoughts and the past of someone through touching them.) The character seems to be looking for her sister who she was separated from in a foster home. She continues to have these wandering thoughts of her laying down on the side of the road dead; being murdered by some serial killer that resembles the character Bob from Twin Peaks.
The meat of the novel is surrounded by the theme of immortality. What do you do with immortality? The novel feels like an extended account of some existential crisis where the person's life doesn't end. The main character struggles with this in her sexual experiences with men, taking to the road, thinking back to the past, and going to explosive rock concerts that contain vomit and blood.
For me this book got a bit taxing towards the end. Not because of the experimental prose, but because it is a very repetitive book (which totally makes sense within the context of the novel but still...) that recycles phrases a bit too much. Overall it was a very well thought out novel that has very beautiful and vivid language that I find unique in literature today. It is a very exciting debut from a talented writer that I hope to see more of.
Nova Express by William S. Burroughs is the conclusion to the Nova Trilogy which Burroughs claimed to be the "mythology for the Space Age" and to some respect he is right. The book is filled with this quest to take over the omniscient and omnipotent powers at be that are constantly referred to as being part of a board room filled with people that are part of the Nova Mob.
The "main character" William Lee is an agent that is part of the Nova Police that is supposed to take down the Nova Mob and the wicked boardroom that is controlling the actions and thoughts of people through words and addiction with a special weapon: the cut-up.
The book that preceded Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, set up what is going to happen this novel greatly. Showing the creation of an uprising coming up against the boardroom and even giving a step by step way of using the cut-up and further explaining the power of a tape recorder (a section that is also recycled for Nova Express) for destroying whole governments.
Burroughs ideas behind the cut-ups are nothing less than genius; Burroughs has found a way to overrule all metanarratives that transfixes the general public in its clutches. In a section concerning the power of tape recorders, Burroughs explains that sound creates an image and that image is therefore a part of language due to association (all of language is relating to image). For example, by using a recording of a political demonstration in say... Japan during the 1960s. Playing it back on three different recorders will insight a political demonstration. The sound of a political demonstration creates an image of a political demonstration, which in turn causes a political demonstration due to the infectious nature of language ( a thing that Burroughs straight out calls a virus).
To me, Nova Express is the weakest of the Nova Trilogy, while The Ticket That Exploded is the best for its amazing cut-ups and ideas. Nova Express to me is just trying to wrap up, but to me not in a completely new way. It feels like it is a reiteration of The Ticket That Exploded with a good handful of good cut-ups, but it was still a fun read.
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