ULTRAZONE – Mark Terrill & Francis Poole

Paperback, $17.95
Publication date: April 8, 2025

“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 living there in the 1950s Burroughs not only wrote Naked Lunch, he also spewed out a mass of much darker material that 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 an enterprising gang of macaque monkeys. Their adventures — often comic, sometimes ghastly — involve vanishing corpses, a magic carpet, giant black centipedes—and a word virus that is about to go pandemic.

“For someone like me, steeped in the 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 . . . Ultrazone is captivating on several levels, 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, Ultrazone’s mix of fact and fiction gives it the authority of a well-researched document nested within an exotic, fully imagined world.”—JAN HERMAN