Acid Test: LSD vs. LDS

Growing up Mormon in 1980s Utah, Christopher Kimball Bigelow wanted out—out of church, out of conformity, and out of the clean-cut life laid before him.

As a junior-high and high-school kid, he'd escaped into Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy novels, and rock music, cultivating an inner life more chaotic and adventurous than the Mormon world around him seemed to allow. By seventeen, that hunger for intensity had moved into Salt Lake’s new-wave and punk underground, where Bigelow experimented with cigarettes, alcohol, sex, pot, and eventually LSD.

But the farther he pushed into rebellion, the more his search for freedom became a confrontation with darker questions about good, evil, identity, and the soul.

Acid Test: LSD vs. LDS is a funny, frank, and unusually reflective memoir of teenage rebellion, psychedelic experience, and religious return. Set against the satanic panic, alternative music, and drug culture of the mid-1980s, it tells the story of a young man trying to reject Mormonism completely, only to discover that faith, doubt, and spiritual hunger are harder to escape than he expected.