Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna

This definitive biography from cultural historian St John (Weekend Societies) explores the life and ideas of psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna, who died in 2000. The culmination of a heroic research effort, given the loss of McKenna’s archives in three separate fires, the biography charts McKenna’s transformation from a gawky, science fiction–loving “small-town boy from Colorado” into “the ascendant Oracle of the Weird.” While McKenna’s experiments with mind-altering substances like morning glory seeds began early, an encounter with DMT at UC Berkeley and subsequent visions of “machine-like language elves” kick-started his lifelong promotion of hallucinogens as “enzymes for the imagination.” From there, St John follows McKenna as he hunts butterflies in Asia while avoiding arrest for drug-smuggling; sojourns in the Amazon, where, following copious psilocybin use, he believed he “crank-started the Millennium”; and, late in life, becomes a guru for 1990s rave culture. St John also sheds ample light on McKenna’s influences and his philosophies, including his late-’60s prediction of “a worldwide ‘electronic community’ interconnected with ‘total knowledge’ on demand”—an uncanny foreshadowing of the internet. Some of the author’s explanations of McKenna’s more esoteric notions are frustratingly dense; still, the occasional impenetrability is made up for by captivatingly humanizing depictions of McKenna’s family life (his response to taking his eight-year-old daughter to Chuck E. Cheese: “MEDIOCRITY IS DEATH”). It’s an account as weird, wild, and nontraditional as its subject. (Oct.)