The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Okay, I might be stretching the definition of “cult” with this one, but hear me out.

This book—which is technically non-fiction, but reads an awful lot like a novel—tells the true story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ efforts to dose America with LSD-laced Kool-Aid in the 1960s. But it’s Kesey’s ramblings about creating a new religion and the devotion of the unhinged misfits who orbit around him that make me see the Merry Pranksters as cult-like.

Reading this book, I get the feeling that if Kesey hadn’t been stopped by the FBI, he very well might have changed… show more.

I read Acid Test as a child and it showed me and told me about everything I wanted or thought I wanted—and some of it I actually did. The book took me from a Junior High School dream of being cool and dropped me off at Punk’s front door nearly a decade later.

This classic of New Journalism (applying the techniques of experimental fiction to reporting) is a chronicle of the long, strange trip across America taken by the so-called Merry Pranksters in the days before LSD was criminalised. Their transport – the original ‘magic bus’ – was loaded with lights, cameras, and sound equipment. Their house-band was the Grateful Dead. Their fate was a deflating come-down.