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Psychedelic State(s) of America presents…
The Psychedelic Book Report Series, Volume 3
My Twin The Murderer
By Lindsay Kent
Review by Natalie J. Storey
Lindsay Kent’s new novel tackles the inane diversity in the psychedelic underground
“There’s a war, my dear stargazers. A battle for the keys to your own mind,” warns a trickster character in Lindsay Kent’s psychedelic novel My Twin the Murderer. “Puppet masters with pockets deeper than the void would see your imagination locked, your fire doused, your magic replaced with meek little crumbs.”
The mayhem in My Twin the Murderer starts at a pharmaceutical company where the neuroscientist Evelyn Malcom is researching a psychedelic compound that reverses the effects of complex PTSD and dementia. When Evelyn’s research partner and crush turns up dead, police find her DNA—or her twin sister’s—at the scene, implicating them both as suspects. After the twins’ arrest, a trickster named Maxwell with a pet aardvark spreads psychedelic gas at the police station, helping Evelyn and her twin Vivian, a heroin addict, escape. But they escape only to take a wild trip through the psychedelic underground.
Kent’s novel depicts the psychedelic underground as diverse, zany and full of mayhem. Maxwell plays the role of the mad chemist of the underground. Harris, a scientist who works at the pharmaceutical company, lives a double life as a priest of an underground psychedelic church. The vaguely Christian group is fighting the commercialization of psychedelics. “The point is,” Harris says, “the Psychedelic Renaissance isn’t going anywhere. Nixon tried to kill it off back in his day, but it’s made a hell of a comeback. Science is finally backing up some of those wild claims from the sixties. It’s like the marijuana business before legalization, and we can’t just sit back while companies like Pharmakon seize control of the whole damn thing.”
At the heart of the novel is the mad rush to regulate and pharmacuticalize psychedelic compounds and its ill-begotten effects. The compound Evelyn is researching in her lab proves to be valuable to both the CIA—who want to repress it because of its truth serum capabilities and its ties to MKUltra—and people who want to use it for mind control and discord. The novel repeats this dictum, sounding a warning: “Corporations controlled by men. Men controlled by fear. Fear controlled by consciousness. Consciousness controlled by corporations.” This is Kent’s answer to what would happen if MKUltra never ended and the war on consciousness continued.
Nearly everyone in the novel has lost their qualms about dosing people with psychedelics against their will. A detective who has lost his wife to complex PTSD doses her with the experimental psychedelic compound. The drug does seem to reverse the effects of the woman’s war trauma, but it unexpectedly also turns her into a wholly different person who insists he call her a different name. Although many people in the novel misuse the compound Evelyn has researched, it’s promise remains. “If this powerful plan can turn off certain areas of the mind, why couldn’t it also do the opposite? We could turn it into a drug that could counteract the effects of Alzheimer’s and other dementia-related illnesses. Reopen suppressed neural networks, boost resilience and plasticity in aging brains. We’ve gotten close—at least, we hope so.” This part of the novel seems allegoric to me.
The idea of the shadow—not just of the twin protagonists but of the Psychedelic Renaissance in general—is ever-present here. Without giving away the many twists and turns of the novel’s second half, suffice to say the suppressed shadows carried over from the CIA’s MKUltra experiments threaten to take down psychedelic research. As each sister tries to suppress her shadow side, the shadow’s power grows until it can no longer be contained. Finally, at the end of the novel, fate reveals the characters’ long-buried secrets. This seemed to be the truest part of Kent’s novel to me, and the most analogous to what’s happening in psychedelics today.
PSA Livestream Alert
The Psychedelic Bookshelf, Volume II:
An Interview with Lindsay Kent, Author of “My Twin The Murderer”
Wednesday. July 1st
5:00 PM EST / 2:00 PM PST
