Inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Burroughs explores the after-death state by means of dream scenarios, hallucinatory passages, talismanic magic, occultism, superstition, and his characteristic view of the nature of reality.

The aging novelist William Seward Hall, who lives alone with his cats in a boxcar by the river, suffering from writer's block for nearly thirty years, is only one of his many alter egos.

Autobiographical scenes include vignettes where the author takes out evidence of paregoric prescription bottles his mother gave him to sink with a large stone at the bottom of the Lake Worth Lagoon, in Florida.

Nevertheless, there are references to contemporary culture; for instance, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Joseph Stalin and Mick Jagger all make an appearance in certain dream sequences.

Ballard wrote in his review for Washington Post Book World that "Burroughs's visionary power, his comic genius, and his unerring ability to crack the codes that make up the life of this century are undiminished".