And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
by William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac
Why You'll Love This
Two of literature's most legendary voices wrote this novel together about a real murder — then buried it for decades.
- Great if you want: Beat Generation origins told from the inside, before fame hit
- The experience: Lean, noir-tinged, and unsettling — reads like a slow storm gathering
- The writing: Alternating chapters reveal how differently Kerouac and Burroughs see the same world
- Skip if: you expect the electric energy of their later, fully realized work
About This Book
In the summer of 1944, before either William S. Burroughs or Jack Kerouac had published a word, a real murder shook their circle—a body in the Hudson River, a friend with blood on his clothes, and two young writers suddenly tangled in its aftermath. Written in the immediate wake of the killing, this novel fictionalizes those events with the urgency of writers who were actually there, who knew the players, and who understood that something dark and defining had just passed through their lives. The result is a portrait of bohemian New York on the edge—restless, morally adrift, and crackling with the tension of people who haven't yet figured out who they are or what they're capable of.
What makes this book genuinely fascinating is its structure: Burroughs and Kerouac alternate chapters, each narrating from a different fictional stand-in, and their voices couldn't be more distinct. Kerouac's chapters carry a romantic, searching energy; Burroughs' are cool, sardonic, almost clinically detached. Reading them side by side reveals two literary sensibilities forming in real time—before the fame, before the mythology—and that rawness gives the prose an honesty that their later, more celebrated work sometimes sacrifices for style.