Industry of Magic & Light

- Blurb -

Industry of Magic & Light is a love letter to the counterculture of the 1960s and a requiem for its passing. The much-anticipated prequel to Keenan' s cult classic debut, This is Memorial Device, Industry of Magic & Light is set in the same mythical Airdrie in the 1960s and early 70s and centres on a group of hippies running their own psychedelic light show. Told in two halves - the first in the form of an inventory of the contents of a caravan abandoned by one of the hippies, the second in the form of a tarot card reading - it is not so much a book about the 1960s as a direct channelling of the decade' s energies, bringing to life how even the smallest and dreariest of working class towns felt so full of possibility in the wake of the psychedelic moment. Via artefacts from the time - everything from poetry chapbooks, record reviews and musical instruments through bubblegum wrappers, bicycle repair kits and mysterious cassette recordings - the book opens out into adventures along the hippy trail in Afghanistan and behind the Iron Curtain that leads a cast of new and returning characters - as well as the authorities - to believe that they are literally making magic. Simultaneously a forensics of the 1960s, a detective novel, an occult thriller, a vision quest, and the hallucinatory exposition of a moment where it felt like anything was possible, Industry of Magic & Life brings to life the streets of small working class towns as transformational sites of utopian joy.