Barry Miles’ Willliam Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible is a respectable biography of the author of The Adding Machine, Naked Lunch and several other works.
Burroughs’ son, Billy Jr., was an excellent writer whose own ability was criminally eclipsed by his father’s literary accomplishments. Billy died a miserable alcoholic junkie in Denver, and as in the real world, is underrepresented in his father’s biography.
Besides touching ion Burroughs’ heroin addiction, his investigation of Scientology, and his time at Boulder’s Naropa University, Miles’ book touches on several details previously underreported. One such is that toward the end of his life, Burroughs contacted Whitley Strieber, author of Communion and several other books about the UFO phenomenon for an in-depth alien confab, and came away convinced of the phenomenon's reality, if none the wiser about its true nature.
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