Following The Soft Machine, this second novel from William S. Burroughs's Cut-Up Trilogy continues the adventures of Inspector Lee in his mission to investigate and subvert the methods of mind control being used by the Nova Mob. Here Burroughs explores his idea of language as a virus, and employs the "fold-in" method—a variation of his "cut-up" technique—to produce a vision of a world in which technology has gone haywire. One of the original and most influential Beat writers, Burroughs created spontaneous writing by cutting up existing manuscripts and randomly rearranging them. In the early 1960s, following the publication of his scandalous novel Naked Lunch, Burroughs embarked on what would be called the Cut-Up Trilogy or the Nova Trilogy, producing three novels that follow an agent named Lee and his encounters with members of the Nova Mob.

"In Mr. Burroughs's hands, writing reverts to acts of magic, as though he were making some enormous infernal encyclopedia of all the black impulses and acts that, once made, would shut the fiends away forever."—NYTimes