Ultrazone: A Tangier Ghost Story

The wild and ghostly adventures of William S. Burroughs and his old Beat comrades as they haunt the alleyways and tunnels of contemporary Tangier in search of a lost and virulent manuscript.William S. Burroughs is dead and buried, but he can find no rest. His ghost is roaming the backstreets of Tangier in search of a missing manuscript. During his chaotic years there in the 1950s, Burroughs not only wrote Naked Lunch, he also spewed out a mass of much darker material he then lost—hundreds of pages in which he wrestled with his demons. He fears his longtime nemesis, the Ugly Spirit, has been lurking in those pages ever since—and is now emerging from its slumber.To help him find and destroy the infected manuscript before the Ugly Spirit can spread its evil in the world, Burroughs enlists fellow ghosts and old Tangier pros Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, Joseph Dean and Brian Jones, as well as an inept witch, an elderly sorcerer, and a gang of macaque monkeys. Their many adventures—often comic, sometimes ghastly—involve vanishing corpses, a magic carpet, giant black centipedes—and a word virus about to go pandemic.“For someone like me, personally steeped in both the very particular ambience that is Tangier and the ever-looming shadows of its literary and bohemian transplants and inhabitants, this book is a goldmine. Terrill and Poole’s deft weaving of fact with fiction is like a conjuring trick—and it’s from here the ghosts emerge. Ultrazone is captivating on several levels at once, and it’s entertaining as hell.”—Jim Jarmusch“The ghosts who shadow the living through the alleys of Tangier are not only intimately alive, they are as vivid as Joyce’s ruminating Dubliners in a tale as rich as anything by Poe. What’s more, the novel’s mix of fact and fiction gives it the authority of a well--researched document nested within an exotic, fully imagined world.”—Jan Herman“Reading Ultrazone is like watching a trippy ghost movie full of your favorite beat icons. All inhabited Tangier during the hedonistic Interzone period, and here they haunt the mysterious underbelly of this magical and sinister city. Fun and riveting!”—Sara Driver

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