Chapel Perilous

The first biography of the late countercultural novelist and underground philosopher Robert Anton Wilson.

Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson is the first biography of the late countercultural novelist and underground philosopher, Robert Anton Wilson.

Author with Robert Shea of ILLUMINATUS!—one of American literature’s most notorious novels—Wilson’s life and work were infused with magical insight and strange occurrence, apparently fated traumas and puckish tricksterism. His experiences of paranoia, celestial influence, and conspiracy have come to furnish both speculative thought and fiction with a unique repertoire of thought experiments, while his legacy might be recognized in the work of writers as diverse as Alan Moore, Douglas Rushkoff, and Tom Robbins.

In this far-reaching biography, Gabriel Kennedy charts the undergrowth of Wilson’s influence, suggesting that the pulp venues, quack pamphlets, and oddball websites through which his work was usually distributed, allowed him to quietly become one of the most prescient American writers of the 20th century, and one of the 21st’s most salient.