We seem to be in a golden age of psychedelics. As a growing number of psychotherapists seek to integrate substances such as psilocybin into their practices (a trend documented locally by Seven Days), it’s no surprise to see a new wave of trippy literature, too.
In his excellent 2025 novel The Afterlife Project, Putney author Tim Weed explored an apocalyptic climate-crisis scenario with a side of psychedelics. Stranded alone in the far future after a time travel experiment, Weed’s protagonist uses mushrooms to hallucinate the human companionship he needs to preserve his sanity.
Now, in The Gatepost, out on May 26, Weed gives psilocybin center stage. His new novel is part adventure story and part cautionary tale, an imagining of what might happen if some intrepid explorer really did manage to step through the doors of perception.
The time-hopping narrative begins more or less in the present. Fed up with her life as an urban lawyer, Esme Weatherhead has holed up on her parents’ 300-acre farmstead in Corinth, Vt. There she spends her days “talking to a ghost” — her father, Gregory, a Mesoamerican archaeology professor and author of a celebrated book on ritual psychedelics, who mysteriously disappeared from the property during Esme’s childhood, 20 years earlier.
At the time, Gregory was engaged in independent research he hoped would “rescue the human species from its current downward trajectory.” From her father’s field journals, Esme learns this research entailed consuming Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms in a cave.
Unaware of any cave on the property, she hires geological consultant Lucas St. Pierre to guide her to the dark maw into which she imagines her father might have vanished in his search for enlightenment. Inside the cave, the pair find no trace of Gregory, but they do discover a Mesoamerican stela with carvings that suggest a ritual purpose: a “sublimely beautiful work of ancient art” that seems “to radiate some kind of mysterious power.”
Esme and Lucas grow closer as she attempts to retrace her father’s steps by repeating his subterranean experiments with psychedelics. They have no idea they’re being watched by the unscrupulous Sebastian Bonney, a popular TV archaeologist who runs a foundation in Montpelier and covets the priceless stela for himself.
Using close third person, Weed unfolds this story from multiple perspectives: Esme, Lucas, Sebastian and Gregory himself. The present-day chapters alternate with flashbacks that reveal where Gregory found the stela and how it ended up in Vermont.
The novel’s premise is irresistible: Carlos Castaneda meets Indiana Jones, but with more cultural sensitivity. (Esme’s mother is Mexican, and a Oaxacan curandera, or healer, plays a pivotal role in the stela’s relocation.) And the conceit of a humble New England farmstead hiding a portal to the unknown recalls Madeleine L’Engle’s perennially beloved A Wrinkle in Time.
What The Gatepost isn’t, however, is a mystery, because the reader finds out where Gregory vanished to in Chapter 2. We never doubt that the stela is indeed a “gatepost” to another plane of reality. What we don’t know is whether the artifact can still reunite Esme and her father — or whether Sebastian will steal it first.
In The Afterlife Project, Weed successfully wedded a nail-biter plot to a tragic meditation on the end of humanity. In The Gatepost, he attempts a similar feat. The author’s descriptive virtuosity goes a long way toward keeping readers enthralled: Every location in The Gatepost is fully realized, from the Vermont forest to the Mexican jungle to a sublimely grim otherworld. The particulars of Gregory’s journey into ritual psychedelic use (see sidebar excerpt) have a spooky vividness that keeps us riveted.
But The Gatepost’s action is sparser than that of its predecessor, and the promising setup sometimes threatens to run aground on the plot device of misunderstanding. The story stagnates for chapter after chapter as Sebastian connives to turn Lucas into his unwitting mole by offering him a dream job. We spend much of the novel wondering how long it will take the lovers to stop keeping secrets from each other, when what we actually care about is what will happen to Gregory and the stela.
The story’s real antagonist is more mundane than anything to be found on the astral plane.
The story’s real antagonist, it turns out, is more mundane than anything to be found on the astral plane: the insecurity of a young man who doesn’t feel worthy of a woman’s love until another man offers him an impressive salary. With his working-class background and bitterness over a failed marriage, Lucas gradually reveals himself as the novel’s most conflicted and interesting character. Weed does deft work in tracing the origins of Lucas’ mindset, writing that “His own painful experience had taught him that … how a man is perceived by the rest of the world actually did have important implications for his closest relationships.”
Lucas’ worldly materialism threatens to poison his romance with Esme and cut her off from the last link to her father. Yet the reader can’t help noting that the Weatherheads’ high-minded idealism rests on a cushion of money. Although Gregory is an exemplary father, his efforts to save humanity via psilocybin not only don’t save humanity but lead directly to his daughter’s abandonment. It’s hard to disagree with his own self-assessment that he’s an Icarus figure, “being punished for his hubris.”
That’s the ambivalent, slightly sour insight with which The Gatepost leaves us. While neither as page-turning nor as transportive as The Afterlife Project, Weed’s follow-up still offers plenty of ideas to chew on. In this story, rather than ushering in a golden age or elevating us to a more enlightened plane, psychedelics leave us with the bittersweet realization that there’s no place like home. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Trance Rock | Book review: The Gatepost, Tim Weed”
This article appears in Summer Preview • 2026.
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