The Oliver Harris edition of Junky is the most thorough version of the book. However, it's no great loss if you pick up an earlier version. Most of the added material is for completists or students, only. The excision of a chapter about orgone boxes, though it upset Burroughs, is for the best.

This is Burroughs first novel and I found it underwhelming within the context of his later works and legacy. The last third to quarter of Junky is when the writing really picks up and we get glimpses of future promise. In particular, the parts where he punctuates a straightforward narrative with a cacophony of sounds and visuals is really effective in evoking a sense of disorientation in the reader. It's a germinal form of cut-up and collage. 

I'm not interested in the junkie narrative or experience but I prefer Jim Caroll's "The Basketball Diaries", which I also read recently, over Junky in that regard. As a warning to the more sensitive reader, like Caroll's book, the narrator is highly unlikeable as are most of the characters. From a historical perspective, it's fascinating to read an account of life in the darker corners of the US and find overlaps of certain neighborhoods and places also mentioned in "Basketball Diaries" and John Rechy's "City of Night."

A notable beat work but not the best.

A classic of the beat generation, Junky - originally titled ‘Junk’ - is a journey into the underbelly of opioid use in an increasingly policed society — that of postwar America. The style is dry, direct, rich of slang and idiomatic usage. It is a crude, first person, largely autobiographical narration which will finds its way into your conscious mind and  make space for itself, whether you please it or not. It’s probably a good place to start with William Burroughs, as it allows the reader to truly grasp the development in writing style the author went through with following publications. It’s a quick read that I would highly suggest. 

This novel is Burroughs' first attempt to rationalise his place in the world as a story. It is not a reason one comes to love him, but it does provide an informative foundation for the rest of his work.

It is the genesis of his sardonic, edgy humour, as his jokes try but fail to land. For example, he quips that gay men "give me the horrors", Irish faces bear a "peasant intuition, stupidity, shrewdness, and malice", and people with epilepsy are "subnormal". These insults read as regressive and mean, rather than some postmodern reclaiming of prejudice or the damming reflection of an aging capitalist society that Burroughs later becomes capable of.

But perhaps that is the point. Burroughs' character is presented as hopeless, lost and weak, as he navigates prisons, asylums, and slums in the pursuit of crime and addiction. He steals from subway commuters to make a dime and injects junk into his genitals just to feel a rush. Yet, his writing remains palpably sober. The world is not as hallucinatory as in later novels, which frames him as a tragic figure rather than a bemused proto-punk. It is in this book that Burroughs' cool highbrow persona is rooted in the material preconditions of drug use and queerness.

His appropriation of contemporaneous jazz vernacular feels forced ("hip", "cat", etc.). There is a sense that he is not writing in his own voice. Perhaps, that is appropriate for the sober, external view he offers of himself, but it is not compelling, and makes for jagged and dry prose. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see Burroughs settle into a way of writing that aptly expresses his dissatisfaction with American modernity and the personal tragedies inflicted upon him that forcibly alienate him from it.

Indeed, both Junky and Queer are likely necessary pillars for supporting the significantly more technically experimental and politically efficacious literature in which Burroughs eventually thrives.