The Mushroom Diaries
Based upon journal entries and notes written at the time, The Mushroom Diaries catalogue six of the trips the author and his boyfriend experienced as they allowed their mushroom induced visions to lead them through the streets and subways of London.
The Mushroom Diaries is the story of two people, a twisted romance coloured in glorious Technicolor.
Additional Information
The Mushroom Diaries contains scans from the original journal written at the time.
The cover itself is a scan of the actual ‘Mushroom Diaries’.
Translation
A Spanish translation of The Mushroom Diaries is available for free from Artifacs Libros as part four of their “British Fiction Collection”.
You can download Los Diarios del Hongo here.
Reviews
I’ve long viewed subterranean transit with a surrealistic twist, something Dominic Lyne advances with his account of psilocybin-enhanced trips in the London Underground, 2004 and ’05.
Unlike many riders who endure the subway as a kind of purgatory or at least in some numbed daze, Dominic and his buddy/lover Sam set out to observe the trains and their fellow travelers with an intensified awareness. They’re youthfully arrogant, even cruel in their asides, brilliantly so, sometimes utterly misogynist in their brutally candid impressions, but they are aware of how freakish they, too, appear to others in turn. “Druggies,” as one voice sneers to the rest of the car. Maybe, but that may be better than drunks, as I’ve also encountered.
These are shared trips, in more ways than one, especially when the prose runs at a mesmerizing, blurring speed.
For readers more familiar with New York’s MTA, the London Tube may come as a surprise. Let’s just think of it as a world of its own.
Jnana Hodson
• • •
This is exactly the book that I hoped to find while searching the smashwords “transgressional” category. Parts of this were genuinely exhilarating, life-affirming, get-up-and-go, fun stuff.
The author relates several adventures with his boyfriend on the London underground. Tripping on pcilocybin of course. There’s about half a dozen separate trips recorded here. Most people would probably go to a party or possibly a peaceful bit of countryside to trip, but not these two. They enjoy the spectacle of the crowds in the tube and they laugh at other passengers. They’re not terribly sensitive and they like making fun of fat people.
Halfway through the book the trips go bad and they spend more and more time lost in long tunnels. The author even manages to get lost in the Waterloo public toilets (quite a funny section). Astonishingly, despite these bad experiences the pair continue to trip down the tube. Their last trips are predictably unpleasant and their relationship falls apart.
This had guts. I liked it. With a bit of hacking and slashing it could be a great. At the moment it’s very raw and the separate trips are all pretty samey. I wanted to know more about the characters and the other things they did.
The Bench Press
Supplementary Material
[File Format: .pdf | Download: right click –> save as]
1: Alternative Journals – Read extracts from the journals written at the time which were not part of the Mushroom Diaries.
2: A Question of Love – An essay by the author.
3: An Insider on the Outside Looking In – An essay by Alan Burdett, a former boyfriend of Dominic Lyne.
4: The Mushroom Underground – A modified version of the London Underground map showing the stations visited during the Mushroom Diaries.
Details
Date of Release:
08 September 2009
ISBN:
978-0-9561612-0-8
Format:
Paperback – 230 pages | eBook
Available From:
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com | Lulu.com
Cover Gallery
Format: Physical
Format: Digital