In a vast suburb stretching from Mexico City to Panama, the writer's alter ego, Lee, weaves his web of love around Allerton, an ambiguous young man, indifferent as an animal. He wanders through increasingly sordid establishments, teeming with a decaying fauna, and on these excursions, he gifts us radioactive fragments of his pitch-black humor. To resolve his deadly and sexual obsessions, Lee sets off with his friend in search of ayahuasca, an absolute drug capable of granting total control over the mind, and for that very reason coveted by Russia and the United States... and by every addict. Willing to plunge into all dangers, Lee has nothing to lose. In this novel, the hallucinatory landscape that is William S. Burroughs's unique world emerges for the first time.

This definitive edition of Queer, published to mark the 25th anniversary of its first edition, includes an extensive and well-documented introduction by Oliver Harris and, as an epilogue, the text that the author himself wrote as a prologue for the 1985 edition.