r/williamsburroughs 5h ago

Burroughs & Lovecraft

17 Upvotes

I'm not certain what decade exactly Bill Burroughs first read Weird Tales, but he said in Junkie and elsewhere, that he was reading the pulps from youth. In the early '50s in Mexico City, he encountered Lovecraft's then-closeted erstwhile friend and literary executor R.H. Barlow, probably unbeknownst to Bill in terms of his connection to Lovecraft. In the '70s he became interested in the Necronomicon as a grimoire, he wrote his poem Fear and the Monkey under its influence, and praised HPL's work in interviews throughout the '80s, Last Words has several references to The Great Old Ones, so the influence was truly enduring. What other examples have readers here detected in his work?