American Underground is a psychedelic odyssey through the twentieth century’s magical counterculture, primarily focussing on events in the United States between 1930 and 1969. The novel will eventually run to 180,000 words and will consist of five interconnected novellas, each set in a different time period. The book’s premise is that the ‘Summer of Love’ that manifested in San Francisco in the mid-1960s and soon spread around the world was a deliberately engineered, explicitly magical phenomenon with its roots in earlier esoteric conjunctions stretching back to before the Second World War and even to the very beginning of history.
This is a work of fiction in that it explores what might have happened as well as what we know did happen. It fills in history’s gaps with sometimes unlikely flights of fancy, and it assumes that magic is real and effective. Appearing as themselves are Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Jerry Rubin, Kenneth Anger, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Cole Porter, Aleister Crowley, Bugsy Siegel and others. The main protagonists are fictional characters named Michael Bevan and Lucien Bright Starr. These characters are based on real individuals. I’ve changed their names because they’re not famous enough to be considered public property, and because I have invented and changed details of their lives and given them thoughts, feelings and motivations that they may not have had in reality. The book also features a fictious religion called The Church Of The American Mind, founded by a pulp SF writer with a dubious military intelligence record, one Donald M Hibbert. Make of that what you will.
Growing up as a child of the 1970s, I regarded the 1960s as a puzzle to be solved. Every iconic signifier of that rapidly mythologised decade, from Sergeant Pepper to The Prisoner to the Kennedy assasinations, was presented to those of us who didn’t live through them as having layers of meaning beneath the obvious surface interpretation, layers that only true initiates could decode. I don’t think I’ve solved the puzzle, but I am enjoying playing with it for a while.
Book One of American Underground is called Electric Tibet. It’s an occult reimagining of the January 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco, and its origins and motivations. If you’d like to read this 34,000-word novella, a white-label paperback and ebook are available in The Shop. This underground edition, for true heads only, will be withdrawn from sale when Book Two, Savage Jubilee, is made available later in 2024.
American Underground will eventually be published as a single volume.
Who will publish it has yet to be decided.
The date is not fixed.
Watch this space.
Bleeding Cheek Press 