The Summer Guests

Over the course of the novel, Chief Jo Thibodeau and the Martini Club uncover evidence that the CIA tested psychedelic drugs on locals in Purity, Maine, as part of a top-secret program in the 1960s and early 1970s called Project MKUltra. This project was in fact real, and Maggie Bird’s account of this project broadly corresponds to what is publicly known about the program today. During the Cold War of the 1950s–1990s, the United States government was focused on combatting and outperforming the Soviet Union. Within this context, the CIA began to research the psychedelic drug LSD, hoping to discover if it could be used to interrogate or even “turn” Soviet spies—and if the Soviets could use it for the same purposes. The project soon spiraled outward to encompass any number of unusual investigations, including research into extra-sensory perception (ESP), remote viewing, and other parapsychological phenomena. The full extent of the project remains unknown, as CIA Director Richard Helms ordered many of the MKUltra documents destroyed in 1973.

Although there are no known Project MKUltra test sites in Maine, the experiments the novel describes are otherwise similar to real-life experiments that took place in Montreal, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere. Doctors or researchers would recruit locals, often highly marginalized people such as sex workers, people without a permanent residence, or people with mental illnesses, by offering them payment or treatment for their participation in the study. These subjects would then be given LSD or other research chemicals, sometimes in extremely high doses. These experiments could lead to devasting outcomes for test subjects, as in the case of US Army Captain Frank Olson, who died in November 1953 after a mental health crisis thought to have been triggered by a high dose of LSD given without his knowledge or consent.