A novelistic memoir, detailing four years of psychedelically enhanced life in late ’70s Britain, written within the trip-lit tradition of Huxley's The Doors of Perception.
In the 1970s Roger Keen was a young art student, heavily under the influence of the surrealist painters Dali, Ernst and Magritte, the Beat writers Kerouac and Burroughs, and the wisdom of the East—in particular Taoism and Zen Buddhism. Into the mix came LSD, cannabis, magic mushrooms and other drugs, which were seen as enablers in the pursuit of creativity and higher knowledge, fuelling a ‘Quest for the Ultimate' that pushed out the boundaries of experience to extremes.
The book runs to 170,000 words and was published in 2010. It is available as a paperback and on Kindle from worldwide Amazons and other retailers. Further extracts can be read online. Complete info here: http://www.rogerkeen.com/the_mad_artist.htm
The following 12,000 word extract is taken from the start of Part Two, about a fifth of the way into the book, and specifically illustrates the delights and perils of high-dose cannabis use—the euphoria and laughing jags, eventually leading to complex hallucinations; and also short term memory loss, anxiety, paranoia and borderline psychotic states.
Throughout the narration is very subjective, in the moment and non-judgemental about drug use. The reader is left to reach his or her own conclusions on that matter.