Christian asked me to read Angela Carter's The Passion of the New Eve, for insights, as he teaches it to one of his classes. Imagine Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night as written by a woman, maybe. That doesn't quite...
I'm about a third of the way through.
The heat-death approaches, the world's ending, the apocalypse's slow gears grind on, and New York has begun to ebb -- its meaning is lost, its significance is lost, and only the worst of qualities remain. Violence. Monstrosity. Monstro-City, maybe, "The City of the Dreadful Night." Into the city comes an Englishman, Evelyn, come to make something of himself. He's effete, fascinated by the aging film starlet Tristessa long since absorbed spiritually into the cultural idiom, she's the kind of woman drag queens pattern themselves after. New York destroys Evelyn, tears him down and rips the meaning from him. He meets an exotic dancer named Leilah and they're relationship charts his fall. BDSM, certainly, but gone horribly wrong and destructive more than sexy. The word "Asshole" isn't quite large enough. He is debased, made awful by his own childish impulses and the city's poisoned breath. There are rats, everywhere, violent hordes that consume whole dogs in seconds while they're owners look on. Dead rat corpses rot everywhere. Evelyn abuses Leilah, can't deal with who she is, what she does. He's selfish, insolent, fickle, and cowardly.
The city brings him down. Alchemy and its symbols recur through the text, starting with Evelyn's introduction to a mad old alchemist who lives in the apartment downstairs. The book's about Evelyn's transformation into Woman, into a new Eve; consequently, to become gold Evelyn must start out as the basest of matter. Consequently, the City of the Dreadful Night puts him in that state of being. The environment nurtures all the horrible, meaningless, stupefied elements of Evelyn's personality. He's cruel. He's cruel and treated as the monster he is and consequently he doesn't do the noble thing. He runs away into the desert to explore America.
It's in the desert that he is knocked out and kidnapped by a mystery woman in leathers, who drags him to the subterranean city of Beulah, which is referred to in the text as a "crucible" - the pot of alchemic reactions. Evelyn's there now, with no idea about the transformation he's going to be subjected to...