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The Western Lands is the new novel by the most visionary American novelist of the twentieth century—a haunting Book of the Dead for the nuclear age. Every new work from the pen of William S. Burroughs is an important literary event. This is especially so in the case of The Western Lands. For in this novel, Burroughs completes a trilogy that began with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads, with a profound, revealing, and often astounding meditation on the themes of mortality, loneliness, nuclear peril—and the inextinguishable hope for an existence beyond bodily death. The symbolic vehicle Burroughs uses here is ancient Egyptian mythology, a long-standing interest of his. "The Western Lands" of the title are the territory to which the Egyptians believed the dead traveled, a blissful land of eternal peace.