CRAZE - Raves Psychedelics and a...
Stephan Gyory
Craze begins in early ’90s Sydney’s underground rave scene—but it doesn’t stay there.
Written by record store owner, underground DJ, and community organiser Stephan Győry, Craze is not just a memoir of the Second Summer of Love or history of electronic dance music —although those two themes remain prominent throughout the book
At its core, Craze It is an investigation into what happens when a generation grows up without functioning rites of passage—and has to invent its own.
Drawing on lived experience, psychology, anthropology, drug culture, music history, and spiritual inquiry, Craze traces a thirty-year attempt to reverse-engineer adulthood from first principles. Along the way, it moves through raves, relationships, religion, altered states, breakdowns, breakthroughs, and the slow reconstruction of meaning.
This is not a book about drugs, despite what it contains.
It is not a book about raves, despite where it starts.
And it is not a manifesto, despite its convictions.
At its heart, Craze is about initiation without elders: how misfired rites of passage show up as anxiety, guilt, masculinity crises, spiritual confusion, and cultural collapse—and how they might be resolved without superstition, dogma, or denial.
What sets Craze apart is its epistemic honesty. Győry shows his working. When he’s wrong, he says so. When he overreaches, he corrects. When something breaks him, he documents the cost. The result is persuasive without being evangelical, rigorous without being sterile, and grounded without being small.
Craze is for people who feel that something is wrong—with masculinity, with religion, with adulthood, with modern life—but refuse simple answers.
Part cultural history, part psychological autopsy, part personal reckoning, Craze gives language to experiences many people have lived through privately and incoherently.
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