HIGH WEIRDNESS - ERIK DAVIS

It’s hard to imagine a book more narrow-casted to my interests. Erik Davis, my favorite “counterculture” “reporter” finally wrote a big huge scholarship-adjacent tome. The other Davis stuff I’m familiar with is essays/reportage or this wonderful kinda coffee-table book thing about fringe religions and religious movements in California. And while all of that stuff was certainly brainy and highly informed, this book literally began as a PhD thesis. Specifically a religious studies reading of PKD’s religious writings. What we ended up with is a broader overview of Terrance McKenna’s, Robert Anton Wilson’s, and PKD’s weirdest experiences. I’m obviously heavy into PKD and Terrance McKenna though I’ve never read anything by RAW. I’ve always felt I missed out on reading ILLUMINATUS! by not catching it at age 16 (there is a large, large category of art that can only really be accessed at 16) but this book really made me want to pick up Cosmic Trigger. I’ll have to keep a used bookstore eye out for it. Davis made the right choice to expand the scope of the book away from just PKD’s 2-3-74 writings to a more general study and deep dive into the weird. I love the mystical, gnostic PKD stuff as much as anyone, I also long of a religious movement that is to PKD what Scientology is to LRH, but  a whole book of just this would have been too much for me. As Davis points out the best weird fiction ripples with brief asides and references and winking glances and seems to point to a larger web of connections. This book is firmly in that camp. There’s a lot in this book about weird books that are themselves about books (ex. The King in Yellow) and this book does a good job to mimic the effects it’s describing. The secondary cast of characters, the folks that have influenced the 3 main guys or provide a lense to understand the core trifecta are an almost more intriguing pantheon. Burroughs, Lovecraft, Pynchon, Guattari (the one I was most excited to see features pretty prominently). All yt guys, you’ll notice. Someone pointed this out at the reading I went to recently. Davis had a good answer; he explained how you could certainly write a book about the psychedelic history of various communities of color in the 70’s but that his project is shackled by the fact that society is set up in such a way that only yt guys can go crazy. That if others in less privileged positions allowed themselves to go as far down the rabbit hole as the trinity in this book, the costs would be exponentially higher. Lots of great diagrams. Tons of wonderful quotes and suggestions for further books to read. I got the motherfucker signed. 2,374 limit-experiences.