The Trouble of Influence

Some writers develop a character, worldview, or mythology so memorable that other writers can't resist taking it for themselves. Many authors have borrowed Sherlock Holmes or turned Edgar Allan Poe into a character in stories similar to his own. H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythology appears not only in other books but in a whole series of short story anthologies called Cthulhu Cycle Books.

One problem with such borrowing is that it's difficult to do and still develop one's own recognizable profile as a writer. In the many books reusing Holmes or following Poe's fictional adventures, there are no particularly famous works or ones highly regarded as literature. It's not that it can't be done, just that for the most part it isn't. Creating one's own identity as a writer is difficult enough without struggling in the shadow of a consciously chosen predecessor who has created something unforgettable. Even the rare exceptions prove the difficulty. Ramsey Campbell, for instance, started out writing Lovecraft-influenced mythological horror. But he didn't become the biggest name in contemporary British horror-genre fiction until, in books like The Face That Must Die (1979), he began creating compact, understated, and consciously contemporary horror fiction that explored the relationship between horror and ordinary daily life. The fiction for which Campbell became famous has many features that are direct opposites of Lovecraft's overwritten, arcane tales.

The above problem makes Davis Schneiderman's DIS (or, The Shadow of the Pleasure Dome) disappointing. Schneiderman is also a scholar who has edited, among other texts, the essay collection Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (2004). Schneiderman's interest in Burroughs has led him, in DIS, to borrow the sci-fi mythology first created in Burroughs's 1960s cut-up novels like The Soft Machine (1961) and The Ticket That Exploded (1962), a mythology that continued to develop in various permutations all the way up through Burroughs's final trilogy of novels (Cities of the Red Night [1981], The Place of Dead Roads [1983], and The Western Lands [1987]). Despite many virtuoso passages of writing, DIS never succeeds in becoming either a compelling extension of the Burroughs mythology or a book that rewrites that mythology for different worthwhile purposes.

The novel follows the adventures of the narrator, Thelonious Bosh, as he travels through a landscape described in the book's opening, amusing outroduction as "an approximation of twelfth-century Asia cross-correlated with futuristic cityscapes." The landscape is a chaotic mismash of never-quite-human characters and fancy technological distortions operating at hyperspeed. All of it purposefully recalls and references Burroughs's creation of a pseudo-Muslim mythology surrounding the figure of Hassan I Sabbah, often referred to as the "Old Man of the Mountain," and his enclave of deadly assassins. Bosh discovers, in various indirect ways, that he himself is an assassin, and that he has a series of missions which he must perform although he would prefer not to.

Even if one accepts the derivative elements of DIS as playfulness with the Burroughs mythology, it's up to the author to make this playfulness something the reader wants to play along with. On the level of individual sentences, Schneiderman often makes the game feel fine. The writing in DIS is frequently amazing. Quoting any of numerous sentences would show the verbal flair on display, as for instance in the following, from early in chapter four:

Infinite cameras and recording devices operate in perpetual motion, disregarding the laws of base physics, lodged in dirty public restrooms, chiseled between the standard-issue Gideon copies of the Upanishads, implicit in the dank of multilevel bureaucracies, surgically implanted into cyborg tsetse flies and malaria mosquitoes.

Taken one at a time, sentences like this genuinely impress. However, anyone who knows Burroughs's work will also recognize that both the rhythm of this sentence and the wild conjunctions of its images come close to feeling like copies. Whether one finds that...