Junkie, beat novelist, counterculture icon, occasional lyricist for Tom Waits and Warren Zevon. Now William S. Burroughs gets another posthumous line on his resumé: graphic novelist. According to the Guardian, U.S.-based Fantagraphics Books is set to publish Ah Pook Is Here, which Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill began working on in 1970 (they called it a “Word/Image novel” because the term “graphic novel” had yet to enter the lexicon).

The Guardian provides a description of the book, which sounds positively … well … Burrroughs-esque:

The graphic novel sees Burroughs tell the story of billionaire newspaper tycoon John Stanley Hart, the “Ugly American” or “Instrument of Control” who is on a quest to discover the secret of immortality. He uses a formula he finds in ancient Mayan books to create a “Media Control Machine” using images of Fear and Death, but ends up getting on the wrong side of Ah Pook, the Mayan Death God.

“Young mutant heroes using the same Mayan formulae travel through time bringing biologic plagues from the remote past to destroy Hart and his Judeo/Christian temporal reality,” explained Fantagraphics, which pointed readers towards an interview with McNeill in which the artist describes Ah Pook Is Here as not “so much a comic book as an experiment.”

Fantagraphics plans to publish the book, along with McNeill’s memoir of working with Burroughs, next summer.