Book excerpt: Burroughs calls up successful motifs from earlier works and recombines them in a roller-coaster fashion. The work starts as a social critique of the inner city, Chicago, but quickly moves to sea. A lost city of Japanese samurai can be found on a tiny Pacific island, and this serves as the action-filled turf of Billy Byrne, a Chicago street thug. He experiences a mutiny among pirates, encounters a lost race of Samurai head-hunter degenerates, must compete with another man for the love of beautiful Barbara, and travels to Mexico where Burroughs combines social history and the traditional Western.