I don't mean to give this bk or its predecessor, "Speed", short shrift. I just read it 25 yrs or so ago & mainly just remember its being reportage on drug use, ending up in the Lexington dry-out prison, that sort of thing. Glimpsing thru it now, the writing seems intelligent & coherent. But, alas, that's about all I have to say about it. ( )

Not the book its predecessor was (sadly), Kentucky Ham wanders quite literally all over the map. It does pick up where Speed left off, with Billy returning to Palm Beach after his near-disastrous adventure in New York; soon, however, he's arrested for passing a forged prescription and sent to the Federal Narcotics Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky (a bleak facility which had first appeared in his father's debut novel Junky) to be "cured" of his drug addiction. A few months later, Billy finagles a transfer to an experimental school for disturbed teens, back in Florida; then the school's director ships him off to Alaska to work on a fishing boat. There's even a flashback to the brief period when Billy went to live with Burroughs Sr. in Tangier, but that just muddies the book's chronology.

Billy himself was not pleased with his second autobiographical novel (in a letter to his father, he wrote that "Kentucky Ham is so far from what I want to do that I gasp with horror at the mention of the words"). The structural difficulties he encountered are increasingly evident as the story plods along, eventually crowding half the book's action into an unfocused, gargantuan final chapter. But, being a big fan of the junior Burroughs, I reread it every now and then.

Sad, funny, hair-raising things do happen in Kentucky Ham (the most emotionally affecting moment occurs when Billy visits his ailing grandmother for the last time), but this book is apt to make the reader feel as scattered as Burroughs Jr. obviously was when he wrote it. ( )