By Graham St. John

Review by Jim Tate

I came to Terence McKenna the way most people do, sideways. Maybe a recording, someone’s recommendation, or a YouTube rabbit hole at midnight caused you to find yourself at McKenna’s door. You hear that voice and something clicks, or it doesn’t. For me it clicked. That was years ago, and I’ve been carrying McKenna around in my mind ever since. I don’t buy everything he said, but he asked questions nobody else was asking. Who was this man who continues to inspire and confuse more than 25 years after his death? When I heard Graham St John had written the first real biography of McKennat, I ordered it immediately.

Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna is a big book. Five hundred and forty-eight pages, eighty-plus interviews, original letters and documents, and fifty-two photographs. It is a deep dive into the murky life of someone who cast a spell that still impacts the psychedelic ecosystem. St John is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Huddersfield and the author of Mystery School in Hyperspace, which means he already understood the territory. He wasn’t parachuting in. He knew the landmarks.

Like all good tales the book opens with McKenna’s California childhood in the 1950s. We move through the early acid years at Berkeley, the infamous La Chorrera expedition with his brother Dennis in 1971, and the decade of wandering that followed. St John reconstructs all of it with patient, careful scholarship. The early chapters feel almost novelistic in the way they track a young man chasing the edge of something he couldn’t quite name. The Amazon trip comes through as genuinely strange and genuinely formative, not mythologized beyond recognition.

The book’s real subject, once it hits its stride, is how a person turns raw experience into a philosophy and then into a career. McKenna did this unusually well. He found his platform in the lecture circuit and the emerging cassette culture of the 1980s, and later the early internet, and what he figured out was that the best way to think out loud in public was to tell good stories. St John pays close attention to how McKenna developed the Irish bard affect. He didn’t kiss the Blarney stone, it kissed him. He used humor to soften the truly radical claims, the way he used accessibility as a Trojan horse for ideas that would have gotten a less charming person laughed off the stage.

What St John is honest about is McKenna’s contradictions. The man who championed the archaic return also loved technology. The man who spoke for nature spent most of his adult life at a desk. His Timewave Zero theory, which predicted a point of maximum novelty on December 21, 2012, was built on a method he himself acknowledged was shaky. St John examines these tensions without either excusing them or turning them into indictments. He seems genuinely interested in how a mortal human being generates a mythology, and what the process costs.

The best sections deal with McKenna’s relationship to DMT. If you’ve read Andrew Gallimore’s Death by Astonishment, you’ve encountered one attempt to take the DMT experience seriously as a philosophical problem. McKenna was there earlier and noisier. St John traces how the machine elves, the hyperspace, and the invisible landscape became central to McKenna’s worldview and why those claims proved so durable. He doesn’t tell us what he thinks is literally happening in the DMT space. That’s not his job here. His job is to show how one person’s relationship with a very strange experience shaped everything that came after, and he does that well.

This is an intriguing read about a fascinating character. At times it is more comprehensive than propulsive. Some readers will find the deep dives into McKenna’s correspondence and his relationships with figures like Rupert Sheldrake or Ralph Abraham more than they need. Others will find those sections the most valuable parts. I’m in the second camp. The book earns its length by treating McKenna’s intellectual life as a serious subject rather than a curiosity. 

The foreword by Erik Davis is good and helps orient readers who are new to this territory. Dennis McKenna’s blurb calling it “indispensable” is not just promotional. He’s right. This is the biography McKenna has needed. The alternative was hagiography or hit job, and we’ve had plenty of both in the psychedelic world. Strange Attractor is something harder to pull off: a portrait with depth and enough critical distance to let the subject be fully human.

McKenna died in 2000 from a brain tumor, at fifty-three. He never saw the psychedelic renaissance he was predicting in his own way. St John ends with a thoughtful account of how McKenna’s legacy survived, mutated, and spread through exactly the digital channels McKenna himself had helped to theorize. The man wanted novelty and the internet delivered it, including endless replays of his own voice telling everyone to take the plants seriously. He moved the needle and this book tells us how that happened.

Strange Attractor belongs on the shelf of anyone serious about the history of psychedelic thought. It’s not a book you read in a weekend but it rewards the time. St John has done the field a service by writing it. Whatever you think of McKenna, whether you are a true believer, interested skeptic, or simply curious about how ideas travel, this is where you go now when someone asks who he really was.