Before Burroughs decided his purpose in life was to beat the English language like a bitch who owed him money, he was writing things like this – a sane, lucid, and readable pulp novel about his addiction to heroin. Books about drugs often have a hallucinogenic quality, as if they’re trying to give the reader a second hand high. This isn’t like that. Burroughs is offering his body as a testing ground: he puts substances into it and writes about it in analytic terms.

This was shocking in 1953. In 2015, not so much. Rich trust fund brat pulls the silver spoon from his mouth and starts cooking coke on it: stop the presses. Even if it’s not a pack of lies like A Million Little Pieces, the story is very familiar. I feel like I’m reading about a man’s disclosure of sexual envy and mid-life ennui. We get it. This is not special.

Its interesting if you want to know more about drug culture in America before Vietnam, Iran-Contra, crack cocaine, and all the rest. But really, not that much happens in it. Burroughs describes how he got involved with the scene, the interesting characters he met, and his occasional run-ins with the law. Beyond that, he doesn’t tell us much. This isn’t an exploration of man’s dark heart, it’s a police report.

Subsequent re-issues have tried to shoot steroids into the story with lurid, impressionistic cover art. But the original Ace Books cover art best captures the spirit of the tale: a man struggling with a woman, who has knocked a hypodermic syringe out of his hand. This is the most dramatic incident in the book, and even then it’s not all that interesting. Burroughs’ sexual proclivities are written about in the same dry way – he throws in off-handed mentions about boffing men, and then its back to scoring drugs. I was curious for more. These details about his life could have been expanded upon, and expounded upon. Instead, we get sketches.

But Junky has some moments where Burroughs really hits paydirt and gives us something good. I liked his description of being a drug addict. Paraphrased, it goes something like “I didn’t take drugs to get high. I took drugs to be functional. Heroin meant I could brush my teeth and shave myself and put on clean clothes. That was my high.” Pleasure operates at a tight Malthusian limit: no matter how much you dump into the brain, once a habit starts there will never be enough. I was reminded of a rotten.com article on crystal meth, and how quickly you degrade to a state where basic, mundane life is impossible without it.

Moments like that are chinks in the armor of Junky, and I wish there were more. Right now, it seems like a paradox – a tell-all book that tells almost nothing. I was hoping for more insights, more details, more specifics on what it’s like to be a man like Burroughs in the 1950s. I wonder if the good stuff was left on the cutting room floor: this was a different age for publishing, just as it was for everything else.

I suppose you could argue that Burroughs promotes a positive social message by making drugs look boring.

Reign in Blood has some great tracks – and not just the two everyone remembers, either.

“Epidemic,” for example, has an addictive syncopated gallop riff that’s worth tuning down to Eb so you can play along. “Postmortem” is punchy and powerful, and perfectly leads into “Raining Blood” (the two will be forever linked in the fans’ minds, due to a mastering error that put the first verse of “Raining Blood” at the end of “Postmortem”).

But much of it is an unfocused riff salad, full of tracks that don’t come off as songs but 2-3 minute explosions of energy. “Epidemic” is riff, verse, riff, verse, verse, break, riff, verse, fin! “Criminally Insane” is another half a song that speeds up and slows down in a spontaneous, unplanned way – there’s not really a musical thru-line of tension and release. It’s like it was written by a Turing-incompatible computer.

“Necrophobic” is super fast, but sounds more like four guys trying to set a land speed record than music.

The album’s greatest moment is “Angel of Death”, which has great riffs, a crushing middle break, and lyrics about Nazis. I refuse to believe this was not a marketing strategy. When you’re a female pop duo (think tATu or The Veronicas), you’ve got to have people thinking you’re lipstick lesbians. When you’re a metal band, you’ve got to have people thinking you’re Nazis or Satanists. It worked for KISS and Black Sabbath, so why not Slayer?

The album’s so heavy, fast, and evil that it’s almost overpowering…but I wish it was more consistent. Great riffs share flat space with dull “speed-pick one note until you die of boredom” time fillers. Heavy metal classics rub shoulders with tracks that don’t even sound finished. It’s very uneven moment to moment and minute to minute. Even the vaunted lyrics frequently dissolve turn into shouted tirades about Satan and slashings.

I like Dave Lombardo’s drumming. This is basically the benchmark for metal drumming in 1986. Nobody else was playing this fast or this technically – except perhaps for Dark Angel’s Gene Hoglan. The production is also quite good – sharp and clinical, with clear and crisp allocation of sonic space between the kicks, the rhythm guitars, the what-have-you. The whole affair clocks in at under 30 minutes – say what you will about it, but it does not overstay its welcome.

Recent years have been unkind to the dinosaurs, and unkind to this movie. I think the Cretaceous extinction event is still shooting a few final hoops against them as the clock runs down in 2015. We now know that dinosaurs had feathers. And we know that an apatosaurus, a tricerotops, and a pterodactyl in the same scene makes as much sense as a historical movie in which Cleopatra consults George Washington on the construction of the Great Wall of China. But this movie is still powerful.

And big. That’s mostly what I remembered – creatures inhabiting a landscape that makes everything seem small. That’s what separates it from Disney’s the Lion King – in this movie, nobody’s the king, and even mighty apex predators often end up behind the eightball. The dinosaurs aren’t masters of their domain, they’re struggling to survive in a changing world. The questing youngsters find a kind of sanctuary at the end, but after their travails it seems a bit mocking – like giving a child a lollipop after open heart surgery. That’s the other thing I remember, the gloom.

Otherwise The Land Before Time can be compared to The Lion King quite a bit – some parts line up shot for shot. Tiny creatures scurrying around gigantic paws. A warped, twisted landscape with a palette to match, full of ochre reds and cinerous grays. The death of a parent as a plot device, and divine intervention from that parent’s spirit to close an open plot parenthesis.

The Land Before Time bears the scars of the moviemaking process – certain scenes seem curiously truncated and brief, as if vital footage was slashed out of the movie with an axe. The whole enterprise seems strangely short – barely longer than an hour. Movies about dinosaurs usually slow down and bask in the experience. This one just has young and vulnerable dinosaurs running from danger to danger, which might stress younger viewers.

It’s probably the second best Don Bluth film, behind Secret of NIMH (whose laurels partly belong to another, as it was adapted from a book). Bluth’s animation studio never succeeded taking much market share from Disney, but they probably opened up animation to a few new people. Disney’s movies from this period are hard to watch as an adult – Bluth’s are not. There’s a nice depth to them: not depth in that they’re saying something profound (every Don Bluth movie can be essentially reduced to a “follow your heart” or “believe in yourself” message), but in that there’s a lot of cinematic space explored: subtle interplays of textures and sounds, and occasional unconventional artistic choices.

On the downside, all the dinosaurs have cutesy names for themselves (long-necks, sharp-teeth, etc), sparing us the indignity of antediluvian creatures uttering Latin phylogenetic classifications at the expense of causing my sister to think that those were the actual names for the dinosaurs.