Blunted Needle

NOVA EXPRESS by William S. Burroughs. 187 pages. Grove. $5.

Nominally novels, William Burroughs' works are, more precisely, potluck: the cauldron, having flipped its lid, spills nightmare fantasies, sick jokes, narcotic dreams and polemics against pushers and in favor of the apomorphine cure. And, of course, concedes the author, "obscenity is coldly added as the total weapon."

With that sort of prospectus, the St. Louis-born Tangier expatriate was ordained as the high priest of the beats even before his first "novel," Naked Lunch, was off the Grove press. Now, in his second of what promises to be a Doomsday Quartet, Burroughs invokes a personal and "very inglorious Pantheon to give the modern world the needle in the same way Zeus and his gang broke up the ancient one." His Zenlike Zeus is the Persian Hassan-i-Sabbah, prophet of an 11th century cult of hashish takers.

Burroughs feels very close to Hassan; he says Hassan seems to dictate portions of his novels. Vying to usurp Hassan's dominion over earth are lesser but formidable rival gods, including 1) the lecherous ones of Venus, who are dosing man with the Orgasm Drug to draw him into fatal orgies; 2) the totalitarian of the Crab Galaxy, who have ready giant ovens to bake humans into insectlike critters in a hivelike commune; and 3) the plain old hophead gods of Uranus, who have become radioactive themselves and are plotting to frizzle Earthmen with their own radioactivity.

This unholy trinity constitutes the Nova Mob, a sort of celestial Cosa Nostra, and the book begins with "total disaster now on tracks" for earth, and "the whole planet absolutely flapping hysterical with panic." Any reader who hopes to learn in the end whether the Nova Mob outwits the efforts of Has san's Nova Police to save the world reveals a hidebound, unhip fixation with the old plotted fiction.

Occasionally, Burroughs' hollow humor draws a hollow belly laugh, as when one Nova Mobster, The Subliminal Kid, eggs on the civilized world toward a mind-shattering collapse by playing over and over (on loudspeakers that cannot be turned off) unrelated sound tapes of jack hammers, jukeboxes and cocktail-hour persiflage. But mostly the novel is a stream of unpunctuated non sequiturs, in which coherence seems inadvertent and in which Burroughs' scatological and pornographic effects no longer seem to shock.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.