8 books like Kris Kool

I’ve read Crawlspace a number of times, and the art never fails to give me a brain buzz. It’s a visual drug that always delivers. The story follows suburban teens who find they can leave their black-and-white world and enter an alternate reality through the door of a dryer. That reality is one of intricate, geometric patterns whose lines are filled with vibrating rainbow colors.

This hypnotically beautiful world has a quality at once entrancing and sinister as the teens encounter the strange creatures who inhabit it and begin to take on its colorful patterns themselves.

I treasure this book for the artwork. The rather simple story tells of Albert Hofmann’s creation of LSD 25 on April 19, 1943, in a Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland. That day is known as Bicycle Day because after accidentally ingesting the chemical, Hofmann had a powerful psychedelic experience as he rode his bicycle home.

This trip is vividly depicted in a lengthy series of full- and double-page spreads, which become increasingly bizarre and hallucinatory as they go along. Blomerth’s cartoony but precise style is warm and whimsical, and he adds striking graphic effects to it. The art is presented to its best advantage on matte ivory stock that sets off the intense colors, which include Day-Glo colors. 

I was fascinated and appalled to learn of the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra, a long-running program in which the CIA dosed unwitting victims with LSD to study its effects and potential as a mind-control weapon. The subject has been covered in other books, but this graphic novel, illustrated by Stewart Kenneth Moore, brings this alarming tale to life visually.

His garish colors and mind-warping graphics depict the hallucinatory experiences in a sometimes appealing but more often terrifying manner. Moore’s art also gives the straight narrative elements of the story a warped, dreamy quality, imbuing even mundane reality with the disturbing quality of an acid flashback.

My mind was blown when I encountered the work of Philippe Druillet in the mid-1970s. This French cartoonist is considered one of the greatest of them all, creating alien worlds of startling originality and stupefying grandeur. Fifty years later, his work is as startling and original as it appeared back then.

No one has surpassed his ability to depict scenes of such mind-boggling scale and otherworldliness, as if he had a unique glimpse of some higher realm. As a young cartoonist, I was strongly influenced by Druillet, who inspired me with his demonstration of what it was possible to achieve in the comic book form. His work is not drug-oriented but depicts the sort of visions those who take hallucinogens would hope to experience.

Sowrider is so unfiltered that it makes you wonder if he’s even aware that social boundaries exist.

NWG2 is a bizzaro, acid trip karmic rebirth journey through history and while the plot is a lot of fun, what really stands out to me is the author’s voice. He’s like the funniest guy in a high school locker room – taking bawdy right to the point of cringe, never afraid to cross a forbidden line, never failing to crack you up.

I just hope he never gets into any kind of psychological treatment, because it might ruin a perfectly insane author. 

If all my choices so far have been, in some way, about the psychedelic experience, this is a practical hands-on guide about how to occasion one yourself. Psychedelics can be consumed safely, but there are attendant risks, not least from their continued illegality in many parts of the world. Vayne, who has decades of experience as a psychedelic user and ritual technician, talks the reader through recommended ways to prepare for a psychedelic experience, how to navigate what subsequently unfolds, and how to integrate it afterwards. This is the indispensable guide for the psy-curious, and even better it comes with a cover designed by legendary British psychedelic comic artist, Pete Loveday. 

There are plenty of academic tomes about psychedelics—their chemistry, their medical applications, their cultural impact, and so on. I was hunting for something more personal: stories of people’s experiences while zonked out of their gourds. What I found was this aptly named collection of tripping stories, with chapters submitted by writers from all walks of life.

It's a sipping book—at over 500 pages, it’s one you take a chapter at a time, not devour cover to cover. What makes the book special is its remarkable curation: the stories are diverse, covering the full gamut of psychedelic experiences from spiritual nirvana to hellish ordeals. Some stories struck me as stronger than others, but thanks to the editor’s deft hand, the prose always sparkles.

Like a good acid trip, the overall effect is stimulating and emotionally satisfying. But unlike a real trip, this vicarious ride is one you can pause and resume… show more.

This book chronicles the heroic journey of Christopher Bache’s 73 high-dose LSD sessions over twenty years and how these sessions impacted his life.

His story was a testament to me of the incredible hard work and persistence required to clear the body of energetic blockages when using psychedelics to reach the highest states of consciousness, including tapping into the cosmic creative principle of the living universe, exploring hell and heavenly realms, and nonduality. I loved how compelling and inspiring Bache’s story is.