Here are 72 books that Project MK-Ultra fans have personally recommended if you like
Project MK-Ultra.
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I have spent my 50-year career as a writer, illustrator, and comic book artist. My comics involve surrealistic situations and alternate realities. I am best known for my strip The Bus, which appeared monthly in Heavy Metal magazine, and Dope Rider, which appeared regularly in High Times magazine. Both series have been collected in books and published internationally. I read the graphic novels of other artists whose work centers on surrealism, alternate realities, and the psychedelic experience for enjoyment and to draw inspiration for my own work. Fans of graphic novels who like trippy stories and art should enjoy the books on my list.
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.
In the basement, through the appliances and past the veil that separates realities, lies a rainbow-hued world where a group of kids have found retreat from their suburban mundanity with a coterie of iridescent creatures. But in the fraught realm of adolescence, can friendship survive the appeal of the surreal?
Jesse Jacobs was born in Moncton, NB, and now draws comics and things from his home in Hamilton, ON. In 2009, his books Small Victories and Blue Winter were short listed at the Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning. He received the Gene Day Award for Canadian Comic Book Self-Publisher…
I have spent my 50-year career as a writer, illustrator, and comic book artist. My comics involve surrealistic situations and alternate realities. I am best known for my strip The Bus, which appeared monthly in Heavy Metal magazine, and Dope Rider, which appeared regularly in High Times magazine. Both series have been collected in books and published internationally. I read the graphic novels of other artists whose work centers on surrealism, alternate realities, and the psychedelic experience for enjoyment and to draw inspiration for my own work. Fans of graphic novels who like trippy stories and art should enjoy the books on my list.
I love the look of late-1960s psychedelic art, which I associate with Peter Max and the animated movie Yellow Submarine. The style is one of simple linework filled with intense colors, to which are added decorative elements and optical effects.
A French cartoonist, Caza, brings this style to Kris Kool, his 1970 erotic science-fiction graphic novel. Like a male version of Barbarella, space traveler Kris Kool experiences bizarre and surreal adventures, many of them sexual. The plot is well constructed and carried me along with its surprising turns. There is no depiction of drug use, but the fantasies and imagery make reading it as trippy an experience as one can find between the covers of a book.
I have spent my 50-year career as a writer, illustrator, and comic book artist. My comics involve surrealistic situations and alternate realities. I am best known for my strip The Bus, which appeared monthly in Heavy Metal magazine, and Dope Rider, which appeared regularly in High Times magazine. Both series have been collected in books and published internationally. I read the graphic novels of other artists whose work centers on surrealism, alternate realities, and the psychedelic experience for enjoyment and to draw inspiration for my own work. Fans of graphic novels who like trippy stories and art should enjoy the books on my list.
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.
Illustrator, musician and self-described "comic stripper" Brian Blomerth has spent years combining classic underground art styles with his bitingly irreverent visual wit in zines, comics, and album covers. With Brian Blomerth's Bicycle Day, the artist has produced his most ambitious work to date: a historical account of the events of April 19, 1943, when Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann ingested an experimental dose of a new compound known as lysergic acid diethylamide and embarked on the world's first acid trip. Combining an extraordinary true story told in journalistic detail with the artist's gritty, timelessly Technicolor comix style, Brian Blomerth's Bicycle Day…
I have spent my 50-year career as a writer, illustrator, and comic book artist. My comics involve surrealistic situations and alternate realities. I am best known for my strip The Bus, which appeared monthly in Heavy Metal magazine, and Dope Rider, which appeared regularly in High Times magazine. Both series have been collected in books and published internationally. I read the graphic novels of other artists whose work centers on surrealism, alternate realities, and the psychedelic experience for enjoyment and to draw inspiration for my own work. Fans of graphic novels who like trippy stories and art should enjoy the books on my list.
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.
Born from chaos, Prince Yragael, is the last hope for Earth. Gods and demons stroll the land, attempting to enforce their authority on the Last Men once more. He falls prey to the queen of Spharain, and from their union comes a son, Urm - a grotesque fool with the potential to redeem mankind.
I read Lolita as a college freshman and laughed out loud as Nabokov made me love the goofy, intelligent, and clearly sociopathic Humbert Humbert. Nabokov’s fun was palpable; it made me want to write. And knee-jerk criticisms of Lolita drove me crazy – how can people take themselves so seriously as to be offended by fictional characters? To me, an author’s ability to inspire genuine empathy for characters with distorted, irreverent, or socially unacceptable perspectives is both genius and riotously fun (something that people too busy looking for a reason to be offended will unfortunately never appreciate). Hope you enjoy this book list for people who don’t take themselves too seriously!
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.
I have always been fascinated by strange and “forbidden” states of consciousness. My first taste of psychedelia came in the form of cannabis—more potent and otherworldly than it gets credit for—and quickly graduated to MDMA, which blew me away. I dove head first into this new world, experimenting with psychedelics new and ancient while reading about all things psychedelic: their history, emerging science, and therapeutic and spiritual possibilities. My other great passion is books, so it was only natural that I would try to encapsulate all that I had learned in book form.
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…
A collection of transformational, awe-provoking psychedelic experiences.
In Tripping, Charles Hayes has gathered fifty narratives about unforgettable psychedelic experiences from an international array of subjects representing all walks of life--respectable Baby Boomers, aging hippies, young ravers, and accomplished writers such as John Perry Barlow, Anne Waldman, Robert Charles Wilson, Paul Devereux, and Tim Page. Taking a balanced, objective approach, the book depicts a broad spectrum of altered states, from the sublime to the terrifying. Hayes's supplemental essays provide a synopsis of the history and culture of psychedelics and a discussion of the kinetics of tripping. Specially featured is an interview…
I've been fascinated by psychedelics since I was a teenager, and along with my book I’ve written a number of academic papers and book chapters on the subject. It intrigues me how subtle changes in the brain’s chemistry leads to such profound changes in perception, cognition, and feeling, including religious feeling. I want to know what those experiences mean, and what they can tell us about the world. For if all they are is some derangement of the senses, why is it that so many writers, thinkers, philosophers and artists return to the experience, again and again? There is a riddle here, a mystery, and I love that I’m able to devote my research time to trying to answer it.
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.
Getting Higher is a manual for exploring the use of psychedelic substances in the contexts of spirituality, self-transformation and magic. This is the psychonaut s essential guide. The techniques presented here work whether you're a scientist or a shaman; there's no requirement to believe in anything other than the wonder of your own neurochemistry and the value of the psychedelic experience. Getting Higher describes the psychedelic triangle of Set, Setting and Substance. It suggests strategies to hold and enhance the psychedelic experience; from games to play when you are high, through to complete entheogenic ceremonies. It will help you to…
I am passionate about exploring consciousness using psychedelics, meditation, and the dreamscape because it leads us toward our greatest human potential. Psychedelics have been my main tool for exploring consciousness, and I want to share how they can be safely used to access our greatest psychic gifts and, in particular, to lovingly share consciousness telepathically with others to explore the infinite living cosmos together.
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.
A professor of religious studies meticulously documents his insights from 73 high-dose LSD sessions conducted over the course of 20 years
* Chronicles, with unprecedented rigor, the author's systematic journey into a unified field of consciousness that underlies all physical existence
* Makes a powerful case for the value of psychedelically induced spiritual experience and discusses the challenge of integrating these experiences into everyday life
* Shows how psychedelic experience can take you beyond self-transformation into collective transformation and help birth the future of humanity
On November 24, 1979, Christopher M. Bache took the first step on what would become…
I have been fascinated with the sixties and its counterculture ever since I was about eleven or twelve, and I found out that the summer I was born, 1967, was called the Summer of Love. Because of this fascination, I started reading writers like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson at an early age. Then, I became a lover of the Grateful Dead and went on tour with them as a fan for a couple of years in my late teens. It was the best way remaining in this country, in the 1980s, to be a hippie in some real way. I still love the music and literature of that time.
Denis Johnson’s big, National Book Award-winning novel revolves around the Vietnam War itself, with a big cast of characters and many narrative threads.
I really loved following all the threads and seeing the intricate web they formed. The picture it paints of America is still relevant today. It’s an exciting book, and though it requires quite a lot from a reader, it ends up being hugely satisfying.
`Once upon a time there was a war, and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me.'
This is the story of Skip Sands, a CIA spy engaged in psychological operations against the Viet Cong, and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of two brothers heading towards self-destruction, and a story…
I’ve been fascinated by thrillers since I was first allowed to read them. My childhood bookcase was full of Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, and every Nevil Shute novel. Later, these were joined by many others, not least John Le Carré. Banking gave me an insight into the murky world of money, bringing with it real-life stories as compelling as those I love reading about. My obsession with the genre is not only with elegant, complex plots but also with what motivates the characters to take the extraordinary risks they do in such challenging environments. The five thrillers I’ve chosen are my absolute favorites. I hope you enjoy them.
I loved the seamless interweaving of narratives, the central quest to secure an asset for the CIA against the hostile backdrop of Damascus, the love story between two truly star-crossed lovers, and the complex survival story of those battling the vicious Assad regime.
I loved the unforgettable tension and pace that was maintained throughout the book and the insight it gave into what it is to be a spy working in the most difficult environment.
CIA case officer Sam Joseph is dispatched to Paris to recruit Syrian Palace official Mariam Haddad. The two fall into a forbidden relationship, which supercharges Haddad's recruitment and creates unspeakable danger when they enter Damascus to find the man responsible for the disappearance of an American spy.
But the cat and mouse chase for the killer soon leads to a trail of high-profile assassinations and the discovery of a dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime, bringing the pair under the all-seeing eyes of Assad's spy catcher, Ali Hassan, and his brother Rustum, the head of the feared…