Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence <scp>McKenna</scp> . By Graham, St John: The <scp>MIT</scp> Press, 2025. 1–548 pp. ISBN: 9780262049573

In 2018's High Culture, religious studies scholar Christopher Partridge comments on the lack of scholarship on explorer of consciousness Terence McKenna, writing, “Perhaps he has something of substance to offer; perhaps not. But more attention does need to be given to his work, so occulturally significant has it been” (Partridge 2018, 321). With Strange Attractor, anthropologist and cultural historian Graham St John has made a sizeable contribution to addressing this gap in the psychedelic literature. Prior to St John's biography of McKenna, whom the author dubs a “stand-up philosopher,” the most in-depth exploration of his life and legacy was the second part of Erik Davis's High Weirdness, which was devoted to Terence and his brother Dennis's psychedelic “experiment” at La Chorrera. Other scholars of esotericism, such as Wouter Hanegraaff, have also briefly reflected on McKenna's philosophy. However, Strange Attractor represents the first serious attempt to document the escapades and ideas of a paradoxical figure whom cultural historian Andy Letcher praised as a “brilliant thinker” while simultaneously questioning the ability of his ideas to “stand up under academic scrutiny” (Letcher 2006, 273). St John's task was far from straightforward. As discussed in the book's preface and final chapter, three separate fires destroyed a vast amount of precious material related to McKenna, including countless letters, notes, and rare books from his sizeable library, as well as a hard drive containing 1.2 TB of precious data from his personal computer. Bookending the biography with these mysterious conflagrations emphasizes the bizarre nature of McKenna's life and the depth of his contributions to the study of consciousness. While these fires add a poetic dimension to the man as myth, they certainly didn't do any favors for St John, who has done an admirable job of tracing the history of McKenna despite the destruction of vast amounts of material documentation. The book is split into two distinct sections: the first chronologically traces the history of McKenna's life, and the second analyzes McKenna's eccentric and eclectic speculations on consciousness, the cosmos, and many more of his seemingly innumerable interests. Readers who are acquainted with the existing literature on McKenna, as well as the vast library of his recorded lectures, will find much familiar here, but St John handles the material deftly and is able to add depth and nuance to Terence and his ideas, even for the already initiated. For those unfamiliar with McKenna, the wealth of information may initially be overwhelming, but the book's structure helps to make the content more digestible. The first section of Strange Attractor traces the childhood, young adulthood, and career arc of McKenna, placing his final days and untimely death aside until the book's closing chapter. Throughout part I, St John devotes attention to many overlooked figures in McKenna's orbit, including lifelong friend Rick Watson, brother and collaborator Dennis, and dedicated plant advocate Kathleen Harrison, the ex-wife of McKenna and father of his two children. St John's attention to Terence's personal and cultural surroundings allows him to reflect at length on post-1960s psychedelic subcultures, which have mostly been obscured in popular and scholarly contexts by the more conspicuous narratives arising out of the 1960s. Thus, the book not only paints a detailed picture of McKenna but also contributes to the growing body of knowledge on the prohibition-era “Dark Age” of consciousness exploration via psychedelic plants and drugs. As St John outlines the major details of McKenna's life, he slowly unravels one of the book's major arguments: McKenna's written and, more importantly, spoken ideas weren't simply an intellectual exercise in philosophy or speculative theology. Rather, they comprised a sort of self-psychoanalysis: a long-term method of processing an emotional life that he tended to keep private, even to those closest to him. Life events such as his mother's death, divorce from Kathleen Harrison, and discomfort with his growing fame in the 1990s aren't treated as incidental details, but rather as catalysts for McKenna's imaginative forays into theoretical speculations on time, alchemy, UFOs, psychedelic experiences, the role of visionary plants in human evolution, and a host of other variegated obsessions. The connections between McKenna's major life events and the evolution of his thought are elaborated in the second section of the book, which is broken into chapters on his “Timewave” theory; his perspective on psychedelics and their role in human evolution and culture; the internet and language; and a conclusion dealing with his brain cancer and abrupt death at the turn of the millennium, as well as its aftermath. McKenna's lectures and workshops typically connected themes at lightning speed, often jumping between seemingly disparate topics, such as the internet, consciousness, octopi, and alchemy, in the blink of an eye. St John's isolation and analysis of these topics is welcome, as readers unfamiliar with McKenna would likely need to listen to dozens of hours of lectures to contextualize his rapid-fire riffing within any sort of broader conceptual framework. Additionally, Strange Attractor includes two appendices: “Acknowledgments and Sources” and “The McKennaverse.” The former meticulously catalogs and thanks “a litany of people, archives, and primary materials” (St John 2025, 17), while the latter focuses on the massive archive of “published work, film, and… a plenitude of spoken-word recordings” (St John 2025, 413) directly involving McKenna. Both appendices offer resources for interested readers and provide further insight into the gargantuan task St John faced in his biographical work. Ultimately, Strange Attractor has solidified itself as the current definitive work on Terence McKenna, offering those familiar with the subject a trove of new information and resources and introducing newcomers to the bizarre and fascinating world of the “McKennaverse.” St John, like Andy Letcher, frames McKenna as paradoxically more and less than the oft-used labels of “mystic,” “guru,” and “philosopher.” Rather, he is framed as a storyteller, a performer, and a nexus of cultural transformation and dissemination. While more scholarly work on the subject is warranted, Strange Attractor represents a massive leap in the attempt to better understand the life and ideas of Terence McKenna, the singular bard of consciousness of the 1980s and 1990s.