Lion Man

The banality of evil
imaginary gods : imaginary friends

Lion Man is the last of Chris Heal’s hospital trilogy. It is an archaeological mystery set among the artwork of palaeolithic caves and examines the development of religion and genocide and the use of hallucination as a background for murder.

Dr Paddy Manning played an enthusiastic part in the birth of the psychedelic era in the 1960s: magic mushrooms, yagé, LSD, mescaline. Later in life, the effects returned without warning. He hallucinated about the art and drawings deep within man’s earliest cave shelters. On his hospital pillow after a heart attack, he daubed a collection of black dots.

In a cave called El Castillo in northern Spain, Manning found an exact duplicate of his dots made at the time when Neanderthals co-existed with Homo sapiens.

Trying to make sense of the mystery by using shamanistic trance rituals, Manning emerged under the influence of Lion Man, the world’s first known statue, carved from mammoth ivory 40,000 years ago. His search for answers led him to re-embrace altered states and took him to native tribes in the Amazon and palaeolithic worlds in Germany and the deserts of South Africa and Arizona.

The trouble was Lion Man wasn’t just an archaeological piece of creative brilliance, no matter how impressive and old. It was an insight into the origins of mankind that protected a terrible truth and exposed Manning’s life’s secret.

And Lion Man wanted a bloody tribute.