Amazon.com Review
Max Brooks Reviews Shift
Max Brooks, bestselling author of Shift:
Did LSD kill JFK?
That's the seemingly strange question Shift, the first volume of The Gate of Orpheus trilogy, which made headlines in New York and Hollywood when it was announced in early 2008.
The half century since John F. Kennedy died in Dallas have seen a lot of strange theories about how the 35th president of the United States was killed--plots by the CIA, the Mafia, the Cubans, the Russians, and even LBJ--but this has to be a first.
The CIA's experiments with LSD as part of its Cold War MK-Ultra program have been well documented (
Enter Chandler Forrestal, a perfectly normal, even slightly boring guy (he's a graduate student in Harvard's religious studies program) whose life is forever changed when he goes home with a beautiful, exotic woman, Naz Haverman. Little does Chandler know that Naz is working for Project Orpheus. She slips some LSD into Chandler's drink, and the next thing we know Chandler is not just seeing things, but seeing things he's pulled out of Naz's mind. Confused and scared, the pair run to Millbrook, New York, where Timothy Leary has just set up his now-infamous "research colony" to explore LSD's potential. But CIA agents track them down, take Chandler into custody, and begin a set of harrowing experiments that set Chandler on a course that eventually--inevitably, it seems--culminates in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Fans of the Jason Bourne series, as well as Heroes' sci-fi angle, will be drawn to Kring's fiction debut, co-written with literary critic and sometime thriller writer Dale Peck (_Shift_ is definitely a "trip" worth taking.
From Publishers Weekly
At the start of this unsuspenseful alternative history thriller from TV screenwriter and producer Kring (Heroes) and Peck (Body Surfing), 1,963 people see an apparition of an oversized flaming boy in the Dallas sky at 11:22 a.m. on December 30, 2012. These numbers correspond to the year, month, and day of President Kennedy's assassination. Flashback to Cambridge, Mass., in October 1963: an attractive woman in the pay of the CIA seduces Harvard grad student Chandler Forrestal, a nephew of Truman's defense secretary, so she can slip him some LSD. The Company believes the drug allows those who take it to access a secret part of the brain known as the Gate of Orpheus. The authors score points for originality in mixing LSD with the events and usual suspects, including the Mafia and J. Edgar Hoover, leading up to Dealey Plaza and the fatal day, but their implausible hidden history of how the world works never coheres.
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