The Place of Dead Roads (1983) Signed First Edition Reference

The Place of Dead Roads is the second volume of Burroughs’s late trilogy, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1983. Set in the American Old West of the 1890s, it follows Kim Carsons, a gunfighter and outlaw who is also a homosexual writer, through a picaresque series of adventures that blend Western genre conventions with Burroughs’s characteristic themes of control, liberation, and the manipulation of reality.

The Novel

Kim Carsons is Burroughs’s most fully developed protagonist since William Lee — a figure who embodies the author’s ideals of radical freedom and armed resistance to control systems. The Western setting allows Burroughs to explore the mythology of the American frontier as a zone of liberation, while simultaneously deconstructing that mythology through his characteristic irony and transgression.

The novel is more narratively coherent than the earlier experimental works but retains Burroughs’s unique voice and his willingness to push boundaries of content and form. The interplay between Western genre conventions and Burroughs’s avant-garde sensibility creates an unusual and engaging hybrid.

First Edition Identification

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York Publication date: 1983

Signed Copy Market Values

• Signed first edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
• Inscribed copies: $300–$700
• Unsigned first edition, fine/fine: $30–$75

An affordable and entertaining Burroughs novel that represents his late-career return to accessible narrative fiction.