First Bite

FIRST BITE tells a story with the background of the use in psychiatry in the 1960s of the hallucinogenic drug, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25). 

Fernley Park Rehabilitation Centre in Surrey is an institution where the anxious and the obsessive, the alcoholic, the traumatised, and the sexually repressed, are sent to be treated, many with the new drug therapies that are the particular specialisation of the innovative and anarchistic Dr. Marius Locker. The patients know his unit as the Truth Wing. 

Here come sensitive and impressionable Simon Woodruff, an innocent in an adult world, to take his first bite at real life, and Bunny Tonathy, traumatised by an abusive childhood from which she cannot escape. The LSD administered by Dr. Locker brings out their secrets, seen through a psychedelic dream world that may be more than their brains can cope with. 

Watching over what is happening is fellow-patient Mike Howell, a recovering alcoholic and ex-soldier, whose own flashbacks of post-battle trauma cause him to attack most problems physically headon. Much of the narrative is presented through his eyes. 

With the background of the new permissiveness of the 1960s, this is a novel of an aspiration for mental health and sexual freedom that ends instead in failure and disintegration. 

FIRST BITE is part black comedy, part stark tragedy. Out of the complex relationships of a bizarre range of characters within the confines of Fernley Park, an exciting story develops, spilling out into the bleak heathland beyond. 

FIRST BITE is intended also as an indictment of LSD’s application to psychotherapy at this time. Although such treatment is now discredited, there has been little acknowledgement of the harm caused to vulnerable patients by the large, and repeated, doses administered. 

FIRST BITE is derived from the direct first-hand experience of the author, and many of the characters, events, and locations are based on fact.