"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe

 Journalism, rather than fiction, but New Journalism in which the reporter is submerged within the events he is reporting, and the book is structured using novelistic techniques; but in this case rather more Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, than Truman Capote's utterly detached In Cold Blood. 

It is written in the breakneck, breathless, runaway prose of Kerouac's On the Road of which it is a direct descendant (indeed Kerouac has a walk-on part and Neal Cassady, the model for Kerouac's hero Dean Moriarty, is an important member of the Pranksters). The prose is laced with hippy words and comes into its own when describing the LSD trips that the Pranksters experience. But there were times when I wondered whether it was a little self-indulgent and needed a severe pruning or at least a little self-restraint; it was a sort of Californian hippy rococo. 

The style is also much more Thompson's with a huge nod to Kerouac, especially ; indeed, one for the characters in this book is Neal Cassady who was the model for Kerouac's Dean Moriarty. Other name checks include the Grateful Dead, house band for the Acid Test, Owsley, the first creator of quality mass-produced LSD (and later a sponsor of the GD), Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg.

The book follows the adventures of Ken Kesey (real life author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) as he travels with a bus-load of stoned hippies (the 'Merry Pranksters') across America from San Francisco to New York and then starts a series of "experiences":  discos/parties in which the attendees take LSD (not yet illegal in California at the time): these are the 'Acid Tests'; in one of them LSD is used to surreptitiously spike the Kool-Aid which somewhat disastrous experience provides the title of the book. It continues to describe Kesey's flight from the law following his arrests for drugs offence and his exile in Mexico, while the Pranksters started to disintegrate, and his return and the fizzling out of the movement.

The influence on the Merry Pranksters of Robert Heinlein's sci fi novel A Stranger in a Strange Land is acknowledged; the book claims that the La Honda location of the HQ of the Pranksters is the same place where the mystic brotherhood in the Heinlein novel gather. The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse is also cited.

The book also claims that the Pranksters, the Grateful Dead and the Experiences were the creators of acid rock and a direct influence on the Beatles Revolver, Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper. These were very early hippies, around 1964; they attend a Help-era Beatles concert on San Francisco when nothing can be heard apart form the screaming of young girls. They are more or less direct descendants of the beatniks; they find a fellowship of outlawry with the Hells Angels.

It is a fascinating chronicle of the early days of LSD use on the West coast of America but it is sometimes hard to cut a path through the overgrown jungle of the prose.

Selected quotes:

• "Everyone is picking up on the most minute incidents as if they are metaphors for life itself." (Ch 2)
• "In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world.  ... but it screens out the most wonderful part of a man's potential experience without his even knowing it.  ... the drugs opened these ancient doors." (Ch 4)
• "the plump little game of being ersatz daring and ersatz alive" (Ch 4)
• "The Now Trip exercise, in which you try to catalogue the information your sense are bringing you in the present moment. You make a rapid series of statements beginning with the word 'Now': 'Now I feel the wind cooling the perspiration on my forehead ... Now I hear a bus coming up the drive in low gear' ..." (Ch 10)
• "The Hermit memoirs, in which real life and his Hermit fantasy ran together in wriggling rivers of little boys and lost hunters whom only the Hermit could rescue." (Ch 11)
• "He talked in clots of words." (Ch 11)
• "Amputated apartments, as I called them The seats, the tables, the beds - none of them ever had legs." (Ch 11)
• "Plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you." (Ch 11)
• "No Left Turn Unstoned." (Ch 12)
• "Outlaws, by definition, were people who had moved off dead centre and were out in some kind of Edge City." (Ch 13)
• "Bummer was the Angels' term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and very quickly it became the hip world's term for a bad trip on LSD." (Ch 13)
• "They start grumbling, like a bunch of prisoners who haven't been fed but don't know whether this is the time for the slave revolt or not." (Ch 15)
• "The Pranksters were not the world's greatest at the mechanics of things." (Ch 18)
• "Cassady had a microphone and started rapping." (Ch 20)
• "A pair of jockey shorts show faintly under the leotards ... just the right touch." (Ch 27)
• "Oh, did we give in to Fear and Doubts, which a good head cannot afford, and thereby stop a brave cat doing his thing." (Ch 27)

July 2022; 366 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God