The Story Behind Hi De Ho, Infecterino!
By Andrew Marc Rowe
Hi De Ho, Infecterino!: The Come Up (The Parasol Files #1) is
my twenty-second published book. In order to really tell you about my
inspiration for this one, I think I'm going to have to really get into
my own history. By way of background, I spent much of my childhood with
my nose buried in a book when I wasn't playing video games or hanging
out with my siblings. I fell in love with fantasy and science fiction
and horror and mythology all of the stuff that they call 'genre
fiction,' since it's not expressly about some super cereal (serious?)
topic and Feelings That Matter™. That's my take on the party line of the
literary stuff, anyway. In my view, writing with mythological elements
always spoke to something deeper than the 'normal' stuff about 'normal'
life, that always seemed to have a depressing quality to me.
After a few abortive attempts as a child and
teenager, I sat down in front of my keyboard after I was called to the
bar as a lawyer in 2013 at the ripe old age of twenty-seven and buckled
down to seriously make a run at it. It might seem silly, to only wait
until after the student debt was incurred and my life locked into a
legal career in a real way before really trying to make art, but part of
me spent those early adult years trying to escape. I partied a lot in
college, and though I wanted to shoot at some kind of achievement at
life, I never really understood that writing was it for me, until then. I
also had to contend with my main demon, which if I had to put it into
Western mythological terms, you might call it sloth.
I did a few things - a Bachelor's degree in
German language, which I can barely speak because I avoided the harder
language classes to the extent I could and focused on the easier
literature and cinema and cultural courses that were taught in English.
After I got that, I went to Korea to teach English, but quit that after
three months because it was too hard (and because the hard drinking
lifestyle of the ex-pat teacher over there was likely to put me in an
early grave). I came back and considered going to Chicago or Berlin to
learn to become a brewmaster, since homebrewing was a longstanding hobby
of mine by that point, but the pay was allegedly really bad as a
brewer, and I would have to contend with large amounts of debt from
brewing school. I looked then to my brother, who was finishing up law
school, and my father, who has been a lawyer my whole life, knew that we
had been financially comfortable since I can remember, and decided that
I would write the LSAT. I did well, got in, and went to law school in
New Brunswick.
Throughout this whole period, my mental
health was gradually tumbling down a hill I did not really see was there
until I finished law school, went to work at one of the big firms in my
hometown of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, and got to thinking,
'is this it?' I had ambition - things to say, ideas to express, art to
create, but I honestly did not know what it was or how to achieve it.
Instead, I just spiralled. I was prescribed anti-depressants, ADHD
medication, the whole nine yards. Eventually, on the weekend of my call
to the bar, I did something that was extremely foolhardy and which I
want to, in every way possible, condemn as such.
I took an overdose of a psychedelic root from Africa called iboga.
At the time, in Canada, it was legal. I had
read up on it, heard stories about it. As of writing this, I literally
just listened to a podcast (in January 2025) of an activist lawyer from
Kentucky and Texas governor Rick Perry extolling the virtues of
ibogaine, the active ingredient in iboga. They're very clear that you
need to do it in a safe situation with people who know what they're
doing, because it has a cardiac risk. People have died from taking it.
And I took a massive dose of it, praying for a way out of the brutal
depression I was experiencing.
Looking back on it now, I realize I was
suicidal and what I did might as well have killed me. I had a psychotic
break, ended up in hospital for several days, and when I woke up it was
very much like I was reborn and given another chance. I felt like I had died.
And yet, looking up from that hospital bed at my little sister, who was
'on duty' at that particular moment (my family was taking turns
watching me as I tossed and turned and raved about the insane visions I
was having), I realized I was very much alive. And I wanted to keep it
that way.
After that experience, I started writing. I
was still unhappy, still didn't know what I was doing, but had a strong
urge to just start forcing it, whatever it was. I read Steven
Pressfield's The War of Art and Stephen King's On Writing,
found inspiration to just sit down and do my work, which is exactly
what a man with the sloth demon on his back needed. Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces was
opaque to me at the time, and has only clarified with the burden of
years of self discovery, but it served to help me understand what I had
gone through from the lens of the Hero's Journey, the mythological
thread that weaves the tapestry of human storytelling. I went to war
with reality and my own proclivity towards laziness to try to figure out
how to write.
And still I was getting worse.
As if this was not enough, my true rock
bottom came in the summer of 2014. I had lost faith. I felt deeply
spiritually unfulfilled. I had a romantic relationship that was on and
off since law school and it was off again. I turned on a podcast, again
the Joe Rogan Experience, and heard the story of Amber Lyon. I won't
delve into it here, but her story touched me, and it involved her
traveling to Peru to drink ayahuasca in ceremony.
Would I sound totally out to lunch if I told
you that the spirit of iboga told me I had to find a 'witch doctor'
(remember, this is an African root) who could help really heal my soul?
That in my mind's eye while it was telling me this it was showing me a
map of South America and visions of the jungle? Yeah, I realize how
cooked that sounds, and yet it's my reality.
I tried to avoid telling my parents about my
plan to go to Peru in December 2014 to do just that. I myself was
absolutely terrified. I had nearly killed myself dabbling in strange
psychedelic compounds from strange lands, and now I was planning to go
sit with a shaman and drink something that I barely knew anything about,
aside from the things relayed to me by the disembodied voice of
psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna over YouTube? I had to go to the
heart of fear within my own soul to even consider this, but somehow I
mustered the courage to tell Mom and Dad, with whom I was and remain
very close. They protested, of course. It was insane to go down that
road again, when it had nearly killed me. No one in my family knew
anything about psychedelics, myself included, aside from what I had read
on the internet and in books.
It ended up being the best decision I ever made.
During the month of the blog tour for Hi De Ho, Infecterino!: The Come Up,
I am back down in Peru for a couple of weeks, my fifth trip to the
jungle, drinking again with Maestro Wiler, the same shaman who gave me
my first taste of medicine more than ten years ago. And it was, that,
medicine. It helped heal me, taught me about compassion, forgiveness,
both for self and others, helped me process trauma and learn how to be a
better human being. I've strived to put into practice what I've
learned, though I admittedly have stumbled more than once. It also
showed me that the pen, or writing, was my 'spiritual weapon.'
It took me another two and a half years before I actually found the inspiration to write my first novel (inspiration for The Yoga of Strength: A Fable,
my first book, published with Atmosphere Press, was the birth of my
daughter, Iris). It was heavily mythologically influenced and was a
degree more serious than my writing became over the years since then.
All of the books I have previously published take place in fantastical
mythological worlds, albeit some in Norse and Celtic and Egyptian and
Carribean lands suffused with deity interference and magic.
I had a lot to say, so after learning the
ropes from Atmosphere Press and finding an editor and cover artist,
everything since that first one has been published through my own
imprint, Sophic Press.
Hi De Ho, Infecterino!: The Come Up is
the first book I've published that is not fantasy, but science fiction /
horror. There is nothing magical, beyond discussions of the magic of
psychedelics themselves. Ostensibly it is chiefly about LSD, which is
one of the few psychedelics without any real cultural trappings. It was
synthesized in a lab in the late 1930s and first tested intentionally on
a human (its discoverer, a Swiss chemist by the name of Albert Hofmann)
in 1943, the same year that the atomic bomb was first tested. It's a
zombie story, a genre of apocalyptic fiction that I have adored since my
teenage years and which I have soaked up in video game, movie, and
literary form. But it's also a love letter to the 60s and the hippie
culture and the great social experiment that seems to have failed when
the clamps were brought down by Nixon in the late Sixties / 1970, with
the drug prohibition legislation.
The history of psychedelics reminds me of the
stories about Copernicus and Galileo, with the religious persecution
that was applied to their heretical notions of heliocentricity and the
spherical nature of the planet... and the big one to swallow, that the
Earth was not the center of the universe. Psychedelics blasted onto the
streets only after they were studied and their benefits were becoming
known. For example, in 1950s Saskatchewan, in my home country of Canada,
a British psychiatrist had opened a clinic that was treating alcoholics
with a success rate that far eclipsed the standard treatment. Bill
Wilson, the founder of AA himself, declared after taking LSD that it
should be a thirteenth step, as it was a safe way of reproducing the
delirium tremens that followed alcohol withdrawal which led him to God
and to found AA in the first place... before the others who had taken
over running the foundation told him he was cooked and to, in much nicer
terms than what I can muster here, eff off. This promising story of
psychedelics started decades before when, as a child, a cop was showing
me and my classmates tabs of LSD and telling us that our lives would be
ruined if we even looked at this stuff sideways.
Never mind the trove of scientific data that
suggests safety and efficacy for treatment of numerous psychological
ills. We aren't medieval creatures with medieval thought processes. We
are living in the 20th century, we are rational human beings who never
base political decisions on anything other than what our forebrain told
us is a measured and nuanced approach to problems. We are paradigms of
rationality and intelligence - just look at what we're doing to
ourselves, our planet, and each other!
Hi De Ho, Infecterino!: The Come Up is
a comedy first and foremost. It's a raunchy satirical comedy. My tastes
in comedy have always been informed by the people who push the edge of
decency, from Adam Sandler CDs as a kid, to Eddie Murphy, to Dave
Chapelle, to Irvine Welsh's black as night humour, to the absurdist and
perverse shit that was flowing through the Internet at the dawn of the
21st century. I've always liked the subversive, the transgressive, the
people who go right to the edge and go over. Heresy is dangerous, but
without heresy, there is no change, no evolution.
And evolution seems to be what nature demands.
Hi De Ho, Infecterino! is the first
part of a trilogy - the second and third books are written and are on
their way to publication in early to mid 2025. The story as a whole is
one of evolution. I don't think anyone who understands psychedelics
would hold to the same dewy-eyed view as the early adopters in the
1960s, the Tim Learys of the world. I don't think that they will save the
world. To suggest that they be put in the water supply, as Leary did at
one point, is the height of irresponsibility. They can be dangerous.
They have a dark side. I don't think they are an answer to our ills, and
we have many of those. They might be part of an answer, but I
think the obsession with apocalyptic fiction of the past several decades
speaks to something deeper within our psyches, the knowledge that we
are pushing the limits of what nature can stomach without a serious
catastrophic reprisal.
That was, in part, what the cultural
revolution of the 60s was about. Progressive political ideas took root
and flourished. Nixon himself is on tape saying that the reason he
banned psychedelics wasn't because he was concerned about the health of
the nation. They were being taken by his political opponents - the
hippies and pacifists who wanted an end to the war in Vietnam. By
cracking down on the drugs, he could crack the skulls of his protesters.
It wasn't just anti-war sentiment. Environmentalism became a serious
political force in the 60s.
In some ways, all of these progressive ideas
failed. The political pendulum is swinging away from liberalism and
towards conservatism in the world at large right now, and maybe that's
why the Muse demanded I write a book like this. It's not overtly political, but it has political implications. I like to say I'm
apolitical, though perhaps my political party is that of the court
jester. None of the emperors, right or left, seem to be wearing clothes
to me, and maybe that's appropriate, because boy is it getting hot.
Evolution is a messy thing, but it happens
whether we want it to or not. I look at my own personal evolution, a
lifetime that is half over as I turn forty in April 2025 and my
mortality is becoming a prime consideration in my mind. What kind of
world am I leaving for my daughter? What kind of world is she going to
inherit from those who are not me? What can one person do, when the
apocalypse seems imminent?
Maybe nothing. Perhaps the apocalypse has
been imminent for every generation since humans settled down and started
farming. But I know how to write a book. I like to think I can be
funny. Maybe I can make one make one person laugh, just a little, at our
foibles as a species. It is, after all, the best medicine.
I'll leave you with one of my favourite
quotes from psychedelic philosopher and advocate, Terence McKenna. It
might be self-aggrandizing, it might be incorrect, but man, does it make
me feel good after I've written just one too many dick jokes in a book
about the end of the world.
“Art's task is to save the soul of mankind;
and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the
artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the
Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be
found.”
Larry Evans was on the brink of his big break. As the lead singer of a rising rock band in 1980s London, his dream of leaving behind his small-time drug-dealing days seemed within reach. But fate—or more accurately, a freak fire and a faceful of experimental fungal spores—had other plans. Transformed into patient zero of a flesh-eating zombie outbreak, Larry unwittingly becomes ground zero for a pandemic that’s more psychedelic than apocalyptic.
The culprit? De Longeuil, a hallucinogenic fungal infection created by the brilliant but socially awkward scientist Hester. As the infection spreads, it alters not just bodies but minds, creating a hive mind of infected individuals who crave brains and challenge the limits of human evolution. Meanwhile, global leaders weigh the nuclear option, threatening to obliterate Great Britain in a desperate bid to contain the outbreak.
Enter an unlikely alliance: Larry, fighting to maintain his humanity; Starseed, the newly sentient fungal hive mind; and a ragtag crew of survivors, including Willy, an adult bookstore clerk battling his own addictions, and Ralph, whose experimental fluconazole offers a glimmer of hope but at a strange cost to her own humanity. Together, they must find a way to prove to the world that the infected aren’t mindless monsters, all while dodging fallout—both literal and figurative.
Across the Atlantic, Subject #30452—a crow gifted with sapience thanks to Parasol Industries’ sinister experiments—embarks on his own odyssey. From revenge to psychedelic enlightenment, his journey takes him to a New Jersey arcade run by a hippie named Zane, where unexpected connections begin to reshape his worldview.
Hi De Ho, Infecterino! is the first explosive installment of The Parasol Files, a mind-bending trilogy that blends apocalyptic chaos with dark humor, wild characters, and a sharp, satirical edge. Equal parts zany adventure, raunchy comedy, and biting commentary, this is a story of survival, evolution, and the absurdity of it all. Buckle up for a trippy, laugh-out-loud ride into the end of the world—and the strange possibilities it might bring.
Hi De Ho, Infecterino! The Come Up is available at Amazon.
People grow up, though, or so Andrew has been told. His interests expanded, limited world views were shattered, horizons increased in scope. Mental health problems became intractable, psychedelic medicines and following one’s dreams were recognized for their curative powers. Atheism became raving pantheism became ‘wrong question, dude’ as Andrew found himself no longer young enough to know everything or believe anything. Instead, he finds himself writing characters who think they know everything.
If you really want to stroke Andrew’s ego, tell him you’ve never read anything like his work before. It makes his writing nearly impossible to market but at least I’ve got chicken, as young Leroy Jenkins once proclaimed to a bunch of nerds in the mid-aughts.
What’s that? You want bog-standard biographical info? Lawyer, father of one, man nearing middle age who gets his jollies pushing and bending and licking the literary envelope.
Happy?
Andrew Marc Rowe’s latest book is Hi De Ho, Infecterino! The Come Up.
Website & Social Media:
Website ➜ http://www.andrewmarcrowe.com
Facebook ➜ https://www.facebook.com/andrewmarcrowe
TikTok ➜ https://www.tiktok.com/@bawdybardwrites
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