A Greater Monster by David David Katzman

Alcoholism has traditionally been the writers’ black lung disease, but the advent of interest in hallucinogenic drugs among mid-19th-century writers highlighted a growing visionary impulse in fiction, calling into question previous forms of literary expression.įor the early Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, the lifestyle of the intoxicated bard required laudanum and alcohol as pilot lights of the imagination. Burroughs, writers influenced by hallucinogens have wrestled with both angels and demons.

From the heavenly mescaline voyages of British intellectuals like Aldous Huxley to the nightmarish psychedelic visions of William S. So with all this mentioned, what do you think would be a rough (or very loose) novel that has some of these characteristics (quasi-psychedlic, vivid strange images, ideas-propelled, etc.Novelists and poets are forever exploring alternatives to normal perceptions and everyday consciousness. Dhalgren, mentioned above, is quite good and is something like what I'm looking for. I've heard people recommend Perdido Street Station, though my preliminary research points that it is more worldbuilding than thought provoking, but I could be very wrong. Anathem, by Stephenson was very good, though less trippy in a sense. A Greater Monster by David Katzman was also very Animal Money-ish, but trippier, maybe too much, but going in this direction of what I'm looking for.

Lastly, I guess that Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, had alternating chapters in which, one half was a dreamy extremely surreal world, that was AM-ish. I don't mind reading backwards or reading with a mirror, but if that's the extent of innovation, while it is neat, it's a trick more than anything, to me. I've also seen ideas that lack good orientation, which seems to me to happen in *some* of Danielweski's books, like Only Revolutions. I've seen good world-building (though not as colorful) but little by way of ideas. There's surely books with strange cities ( Dhalgren, etc.), but AM was propelled by the notion that something is being developed that will change the world, and much of the first half of the book uses the setting to propel the idea. The second aspect, is the idea, or one of the main ideas of the novel - the cumulative value added money. It seemed to me to be mixture of the weird accepted with total normalcy, but the vivid bright images struck me.

A strange city full of colors, quasi psychedelic and strange. I suppose the first feature I can isolate is the sheer imagery. So let me mention what features in Animal Money (AM) specifically struck me to see if any of the features mentioned are more or less seen in other novels. I know, nobody writes like Michael Cisco.

A Greater Monster by David David Katzman