In the House of My Fear

In the spring of 1964, Joel Agee, not quite at home in his native New York (having spent much of his youth behind the Iron Curtain), accidentally ingests a sizeable dose of LSD. He is thrown from the precincts of bohemian normalcy into a whirl of bizarre synchronicities, symbols, and omens. His brilliant, mentally ill younger brother is descending into a psychic netherworld without chemical inducement, and the culture at large is undergoing a mutation of its own. A small inheritance comes Joel’s way. Together with his wife and their infant daughter, he emigrates in search of kindred souls. On the way, a fantastic project takes root in his imagination: to exorcize his brother’s madness by transforming his own consciousness, first with “acid,” then in a quest for enlightenment under the tutelage of spiritual teachers. Thirty years later, a sobered Joel Agee sets himself the task of recounting his adventures. Somewhere, he knows, the ghosts of past terrors—his own and his brother’s, who died by his own hand at the age of twenty-seven—are still trapped and crying for release. To find them, to save them, he must write his way into the house of his fear.