William S. Burroughs is dead and buried, but he can find no rest. His ghost is roaming the backstreets of Tangier in search of a missing manuscript. During his chaotic years living there in the 1950s Burroughs not only wrote Naked Lunch, he also spewed out a mass of much darker material that he then lost - hundreds of pages in which he wrestled with his demons.
He fears his longtime nemesis, the Ugly Spirit, has been lurking in those pages ever since - and is now emerging from its slumber. To help him find and destroy the infected manuscript before the Ugly Spirit can spread its evil in the world, Burroughs enlists fellow ghosts and old Tangier pros Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, Joseph Dean and Brian Jones, as well as an inept witch, an elderly sorcerer, and an enterprising gang of macaque monkeys.
Their adventures - often comic, sometimes ghastly - involve vanishing corpses, a magic carpet, giant black centipedes and a word virus that is about to go pandemic.