LURID: Bad Trips - Ten Novels With Serious Drug Psychosis

2. 'Diary of A Drug Fiend' (1922) by Aleister Crowley

Despite its tabloid-baiting title (and, boy, did the tabloids go into a frenzy upon publication), this thinly-disguised autobiography from Crowley contains an honest and insightful depiction of addiction.  He wrote it not only for the quick cash from publishers, Collins, but also as a riposte to the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 which made opium (and all its derivatives) and cocaine illegal. Crowley had been using these substances in his magickal and philosophical workings for many years and resented being criminalized or diagnosed as suffering from a disease.  The titular “Fiend” is actually WW1 flying ace, Peter Pendragon, knighted for his aerial dynamics against the Boche.  Bored and directionless after Armistice Day, he falls in love with prototype Bright Young Thing Louise Laleham, who introduces him to the all the highs and lows that heroin and cocaine can offer them across the hotspots of post-war Europe.  Eventually, the drug fun grinds to a halt and the young couple turn to King Lamus, a magickal adept who teaches them that human Will can overcome anything, even chemical dependency. 

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3. 'Naked Lunch' (1959) by William S. Burroughs

Bombastic, blustering, boot-in-your-face Burroughs doesn’t pull any punches in his Beat-driven account of a (mainly) heroin addiction that crosses time and space.  Are you tough enough to take it?  In the introduction, he implies that he doesn’t want the reader to enjoy his work (“it is necessarily brutal, obscene and disgusting.  Sickness has often repulsive details not for weak stomachs”).  Written in a hotel room in Tangier, when (Burroughs claims) “I had not taken a bath in a year or changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction,” Naked Lunch is less a novel, more a blend of dream, digression, delusion and diatribe.  A mélange of junk, sex (including an orgy), social critique and self-loathing, strung out in loops of logic and location that only make sense to the loaded. 

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4. 'A Clockwork Orange' (1962) by Anthony Burgess

From the first page, when he and his droogs sip on their “milk plus something”, Alex DeLarge’s impulses are inextricably linked to his drug consumption.  Although he knows his hallucinogens (“vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg”) he thinks that tripping your tits off in a mesto is, at the end of the day, “very cowardly”.  He prefers stimulants that will enhance his capacity for a bit of the old ultraviolence.  Alex enjoys anything that heightens his sensory awareness, whether he’s listening to Beethoven, raping underage girls, or conducting a home invasion with a few close friends.  However, Burgess weaves drugs into Alex’s rise and fall; our hero is prevented from running amok any more by being chemically castrated (“this Ludovico stuff was like a vaccination and there it was cruising about in my krovvy, so that I would be sick always for ever and ever amen whenever I viddied any of this ultra-violence”) – or so he thinks. 

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5. 'Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream' (1972) by Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson’s autobiographical account of a trip to Vegas on a press junket for the annual Mint 400 desert race - with what  “looked like a mobile police narcotics lab” in the trunk of the rental car - is by turns hilarious and terrifying.  The protagonist, Raoul Duke, brings along his Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo, plus

"...two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls."

Together they embark on what can only be described as a rampage, “burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help”.  Thompson’s coruscating, manic prose captures the mayhem perfectly, never letting the pace of their paranoia slacken, but never losing his grip on the satiric thread that gives their adventures at least some structure.  Fear And Loathing… is simultaneously an insane head-trip and a sober commentary on “this doomstruck era of Nixon”. Despite the marauding bats, lizards, weasels and a detour through Circus-Circus (“what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war”), Duke and Gonzo persist in their search for the American Dream.  So much more substance (and substance abuse) than all The Hangover movies made and still yet to be made, rolled into a skinny 124 pages.

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6. 'A Scanner Darkly' (1977) by Philip K. Dick

Dick’s dystopian noir vision of a future (1994) society split between straights and addicts of the psychoactive Substance D (nickname: death) is based on his personal experience of drug abuse in Orange County in the early 1970s.  After his fourth wife left, he invited various street kids to come and live with him so that his house didn’t feel so large and empty.  He soon became dependent on amphetamines and immersed in the slang and rhythms of their alternative culture.  It’s obvious that Dick identifies with Fred/Arctor, the narcotics double agent at the center of the narrative who is living undercover in a junkie house, and is slowly becoming addicted to Substance D himself.  It’s a dangerous position to be in:

"What an undercover narcotics agent fears most is not that he will be shot or beaten up but that he will be slipped a great hit of some psychedelic that will roll an endless horror feature film in his head for the remainder of his life, or that he will be shot up with a mex hit, half heroin and half Substance D, or both of the above plus a poison such as strychnine, which will nearly kill him but not completely, so that the above can occur: lifelong addiction, lifelong horror film. He will sink into a needle-and-a-spoon existence, or bounce off the walls in a psychiatric hospital or, worst of all, a federal clinic."

After the two hemispheres of his brain stop communicating, thanks to the permanent neurophysical damage wreaked by Substance D, Arctor ends up in his worst nightmare, forced rehab.  Bleak, uncompromising, elegiac, A Scanner Darkly is probably Dick’s best novel, but he had to put himself through hell to write it.

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7. 'Requiem For A Dream' (1978) by Hubert Selby, Jr.

Even more bleak is Requiem for A Dream.  Selby explores addiction as it affects the lives of a loosely linked quartet – Sara Goldfarb and her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion and his friend Tyrone.  Over three seasons in New York City, their lives disintegrate thanks to narcotic influences.  While Harry, Marion and Tyrone fall victim to heroin, Sara’s poison of choice is diet pills and her story is the saddest.  She has very little conception of what is happening to her and why, even when psychosis hits and she’s locked away and subjected to electric shock treatment.  Nobody else gets a happy ending either, with jail, prostitution and a nasty amputation on the cards.  Selby takes the reader unflinchingly through the characters’ chain of bad choices, and their continued misunderstanding of the threat they face. “He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.”  Quite possibly the saddest book you’ll ever read.

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8. 'Trainspotting' (1994) by Irvine Welsh

By contrast, Trainspotting is almost joyous.  A loosely-linked series of vignettes and characters, it’s a celebration of male friendship and youth culture in Britain in the late 1980s, as well as an exploration of the dark side of hedonism.  The central characters are all addicted to something – mostly heroin, but with alcohol, amphetamines and violence thrown into the mix.  To some extent, Welsh’s Edinburgh is a manifestation of Burgess’s dystopia from A Clockwork Orange.  Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, and Tommy could all be droogs to Begbie’s Alex, but they exist in a bitterly realistic world of unemployment, poverty, HIV infection and cot death.  And opium suppositories that Renton must retrieve from the most disgusting blocked toilet in literary history, the “bowl fill ay broon water, toilet paper and lumps ay floating shite”:

"Ah roll up ma shirt sleeve and hesitate only briefly, glancing at ma scabby and occasionally weeping track marks, before plunging ma hands and forearms intae the brown water. Ah rummage fastidiously and get one ay ma bombs back straight away. Ah rub off some shite that's attached tae it. A wee bit melted, but still largely intact."

Although Welsh can be compassionate towards his characters when necessary (particularly those who have to deal with the all-too-common drug related death of a loved one), Renton, his main narrator, is as caustic as Thompson when it comes to describing the under-the-influence antics of his friends.  Trainspotting resonates with a slick, sick sense of humor.  It’ll put you off a lot of things for life.

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9. 'Crank' (2004) by Ellen Hopkins

So much of the drugs oeuvre is so macho, it’s refreshing to read a story about and from the female perspective.  Hopkins based the oft-banned book on her own daughter’s four-year battle with crystal meth.  In free verse, she charts the slide into substance abuse of  “perfect daughter: gifted high school junior, quiet, and never any trouble” Kristina, whose first and main mistake is to fall in love with the wrong boy, Adam.  With soap opera-unseemly speed after her first hit of crank (supplied by Adam) Kristina (who starts to refer to herself as Bree) is hurled through the looking glass into a world of suicide attempts, rape, a stint in juvy hall, Mexican connections, meth-dealing and, to top it all, pregnancy.  Kristina/Bree is as confused as any other teenage girl, but Hopkins makes it chillingly clear how her meth use amplifies the usual adolescent folly into tragedy.  There’s no glamorization of the lifestyle here, Crank is cautionary tale all the way:

"you fly until you crash two days
two nights
no sleep,
no food,
come down off the monster
YOU CRASH REAL HARD"

Even if you’re a seasoned Breaking Bad fan, Crank hits much, much harder than you might expect from a book aimed primarily at middle school girls.

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10. 'Eating Smoke: One Man's Descent into Drug Psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad Heart­land' (2011) by Chris Thrall

Former Royal Marine Thrall charts the by-now familiar downward spiral into meth psychosis in this candid memoir about navigating “the world's most unforgiving city while addicted to the world's most dangerous drug”.  It’s set in Hong Kong, in the couple of years immediately before the Handover to China.  No one knew what kind of limits Beijing would impose on its newest territory come July 1^st 1997; in the underground dance clubs of Wan Chai it was time to party like it was the end of the world.  Thrall’s story is of the innocent who got lost in these hedonistic woods, describing himself as “not a stupid guy, just an average guy who does stupid things”.  After his network marketing business is a bust, he sinks through a couple of layers of low-paid ex-pat gigs before landing as a nightclub doorman.  At first, it’s a great way to meet people and chat up girls – working and regular -  but soon he finds himself doing ice (known locally as 'bing') in order to stay awake for his shifts and his new 72-hour party pals.  And then more ice.  And then more, until he stops sleeping, starts losing job after job, his apartment and his grip on reality.   And realizes he’s employed at an establishment run by the notorious 14K Triad gang, who are pissed at him.  Thrall’s always a likable voice, even when he’s taking the reader on one of his most hyper-paranoid trips, and you will root for his survival and redemption.  He captures the underground heartbeat of a crazy city at a crazy time.

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