An intellectual biography of one of the most celebrated and yet least understood figures of the late twentieth century, Terence McKenna. A stand-up philosopher who made a unique contribution to science, humanism, and the hidden arts, Terence McKenna (1946-2000) was the twentieth century s psychedelic Renaissance man. Perfecting his rugged philosophy on the role of psychedelics in evolution, consciousness, and time, McKenna was a riotous charmer who stalked the shadows, but also sought the iridescence. More than twenty years since his untimely passing, McKenna has an enduring magnetism across the virtual pop stream, in pervasive digitization, and within social media networks. In the first biography of this enigmatic figure Strange Attractor, with a foreword by Erik Davis, Graham St John detects the signal behind the noise. This book is an engaging chronicle of the life, works, and legacy of this brazen adventurer of the inner and outer dimensions, whose weird intelligence affected multitudes and who continues to haunt the present. St John gathers previously unpublished materials (including McKenna s journal, letters, and ephemera) and over 70 interviews with his friends, family, and co-conspirators, as well as a magnificent gallery of 52 photographs and artworks. Neither glorifying nor disparaging its subject, Strange Attractor will appeal to those interested in the evolution of a psychedelic intellectual, and to those for whom McKenna s wisdom endures.

“An account as weird, wild, and nontraditional as its subject.”
– Publishers Weekly

“ [A] delightful new biography.”
– Reason

“Due to St John’s intellectual reach, the book has, like a dark planet, drawn an entire menagerie of late 20th-century weirdness into its oblique orbit. With two appendices and 75 pages of notes, it is comprehensive and reference-heavy and seems to have left nothing unexamined in the labyrinth of the McKennaverse. The McKenna persona, familiar today from countless audio recordings strewn across the internet, is not so much invalidated here as given a merely human quality; the book is nothing if not the biography of a mortal. And for this we can be grateful, given the near-deification of McKenna that is well underway in some corners of the internet . . . The second part of the biography is a valiant attempt to lay out the various components of McKenna’s theoretical project, in what may constitute a groundwork for McKenna studies.”
– Los Angeles Review of Books

"A sympathetic and infectious travelogue of McKenna's psychedelic multiverse, but also pretty unflinching and even rigorous in unpacking the very, very high weirdness.”
—Jesse Jarnow, author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America

"Excellent scholarship, eloquently written, and deeply illuminating of its subject... Now it is possible to see the complexity of the man behind the raps." —Psychedelic Press

Graham St John is Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow in Music and Design Arts at the University of Huddersfield. He is the author of ten books, including Mystery School in Hyperspace, Global Tribe, and Technomad. He is founding Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture and has published widely on the Burning Man movement and culture.