Review: 'The Road of Excess' by Marcus Boon

Originally published in 2002 ‘The Road of Excess -- A History of Writers on Drugs’ by Marcus Boon explores what he describes as the age-old relationship between literature and drugs. As a comprehensive survey of drug literature, the text is both an entertaining read and an invaluable well of source information, which crafts modern, scholarly technique with a hitherto poorly explored area of writing.

Boon employs an interdisciplinary, cultural approach to the historical connections between drugs and literature, borrowing much from a Deleuzian model and in doing so he creates an effective ethnography. This postmodern approach, free of any rigid conceptual framework, lends itself to a lucid exploration and an engaging narrative: "What interested me was to reveal more subtle, micropolitical histories of everyday interactions between human beings and particular psychoactive substances and to find out whether these histories had left their traces in literature" (Boon 9). As such, he deals with both authors and drugs as mechanisms for socio-historical and cultural forces, which has the effect of drawing out many interesting ideas.