William S. Burroughs Jr. ("Billy") wrote two autobiographical novels, Speed and Kentucky Ham, in the early 1970s. After the publication of the second book, Billy began a painful descent into alcoholism and chronic illness; he died in 1981, a little less than five years after receiving a liver transplant. He was thirty-three. Employing scraps of his unfinished third novel Prakriti Junction, correspondence between Burroughs Jr. and his father (as well as James Grauerholz, Burroughs Sr.'s secretary and editor), and interviews with those who knew him, Cursed from Birth documents the suffering that Billy endured in the last decade of his life. The elder Burroughs seems almost unbelievably abstracted and cantankerous, peevishly disinclined to deal with his son's understandable confusion and resentment; Billy, while occasionally exasperating, comes across as an actual human being who, sadly, had ample reason for yielding to his self-destructive impulses.

Fascinating but heartbreaking, at times almost brutally so. Four and a half stars. (Please do read Speed: it's a great novel, the one for which Billy should be remembered.) ( )