I really wanted to like this book. It’s the last one I am reviewing for 2009, and I am a huge fan of Terence McKenna. But this one fell short for me.

The Invisible Landscape is a collaborative effort between Terence and Dennis McKenna, known in the psychedelia circuit as the “McKenna brothers.” The events of this book took place during 1971, and the inspiration for a lot of the ideas contained within occurred during the La Chorrera experiment, which is explained in Terence’s book True Hallucinations. I reviewed that book earlier this year. In my opinion, it is much easier for the layman to trudge through than The Invisible Landscape, which was simply to above-my-head for me to enjoy.

The McKenna brothers cover a lot of ground in this one - shamans, schizophrenia, holographic thought, the experiment at La Chorrera, the I Ching, the Timewave hypothesis and the prediction of the eschaton - the end of the world-as-we-know-it that is expected to take place on December 21, 2012. Every topic is thoroughly explained. But it’s just all too much. The book is all over the place - it would help greatly to have a doctoral background on all of the topics I have listed above before attempting to read this one.

And yet, I still liked the book. The parts that I understood were pretty entertaining and thought-provoking. I enjoyed the graphs and figures of the Timewave hypothesis, something I have read a lot about but not seen very much of. As a fan of most of the topics in the previous paragraph, I found the book very interesting. Luckily I received a copy of this for my birthday this year, so I can hopefully come back to it with a better background later. If you’re a fan of the McKenna brothers or any of the above topics, maybe you should give this one the old college try.

3/5 Stars. 229 pages. Published 1975.