Ultrazone (Paperback)

“A helter-skelter rush of delights . . . a slapstick horror-fantasy romp that sometimes achieves real depth and poignancy”—ALAN MOORE

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 adventures — often comic, sometimes ghastly — involve vanishing corpses, a magic carpet, giant black centipedes—and a word virus about to go pandemic.

Mark Terrill is the author of several collections of poems and prose poems, including Bread & Fish and Great Balls of Doubt. He shipped out as a merchant seaman, and later traveled extensively as tour manager for bands such as American Music Club and the Mekons. He participated in the School of Visual Arts Writing Workshop taught by Paul Bowles in Tangier in 1982, and has written about his experiences there in his recently republished memoir, Here to Learn: Remembering Paul Bowles.

Francis Poole is a writer and the editor of BLADES magazine. He lived in Morocco in the 1980s while teaching at the American School of Tangier, where he became friends with Paul Bowles. His publications include Tangier and the Beats: Sanctuary of Noninterference, Everybody Comes to Dean’s, and a collection of his poems, Snakeskin Raincoat.

In addition to co-authoring Ultrazone, Terrill and Poole have published two collaborative chapbooks of poetry, The Spleen of Madrid and A Pair of Darts.