Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties

The Bad Trip is a literary and cultural history of the late 1960s and early 1970s that connects art, film, poetry, politics, murder, and revolt. It explores the psychedelic utopianism of the sixties and the dark seam of apocalyptic thinking that ruptured into violence and despair by 1969.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 416 pages
Publication date: 04 March 2021
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

Beneath the psychedelic utopianism of the 1960s lay a dark seam of apocalyptic thinking that seemed to rupture into violence and despair by 1969. Literary and cultural historian James Riley descends into this underworld and traces the historical and conspiratorial threads connecting art, film, poetry, politics, murder, and revolt. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Manson Family, and Roman Polanski, ley-line hunters, and Illuminati believers, Aldous Huxley, Joan Didion, and the Beat poets, radical protest movements, and occult groups all come together in Riley's gripping narrative. Steeped in the hopes, dreams, and anxieties of the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Bad Trip tells the strange stories of some of the period's most compelling figures as they approached the end of an era and imagined new worlds ahead.

Beneath the psychedelic utopianism of the 1960s lay a dark seam of apocalyptic thinking that seemed to rupture into violence and despair by 1969.

Literary and cultural historian James Riley descends into this underworld and traces the historical and conspiratorial threads connecting art, film, poetry, politics, murder, and revolt. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Manson Family, and Roman Polanski, ley-line hunters, and Illuminati believers, Aldous Huxley, Joan Didion, and the Beat poets, radical protest movements, and occult groups all come together in Riley's gripping narrative. Steeped in the hopes, dreams, and anxieties of the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Bad Trip tells the strange stories of some of the period's most compelling figures as they approached the end of an era and imagined new worlds ahead.

Weight: 304g
Dimension: 129 x 198 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781785785948