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 boyhood and youth behind the Iron Curtain), accidentally ingests a sizeable dose of LSD. All at once he is thrown from the precincts of bohemian normalcy into a whirl of bizarre synchronicities, symbols and omens. Nothing is ever the same again. His brilliant, mentally ill younger brother is descending into a psychic netherworld without chemical inducement, and the culture at large, not to be outdone for surreal extremeness, is undergoing a mutation of its own: apocalypse and utopia appear to be equally imminent.A small inheritance comes Joel's way. Together with his wife and their infant daughter, he emigrates in search of kindred souls a picaresque journey that takes him through Spain, England, Italy, Switzerland, and France. 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 now the author of the widely reviewed memoir, Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany sets himself the task of recounting his adventures.