Focus Features

Many writers from Thomas de Quincy to William Burroughs have attempted to describe in prose the strange sensation of being on drugs. Despite some surreal and soaring passages, few literary renditions have ever been able to produce the sensory overload created by film. This no doubt stems from the way that drugs and films are so similar: both distort space and time, both offer a limited time-based trip; both are addictive. Since writers have often borne the brunt of trying to articulate the fleeting, ineffable experience of being high, we asked some of our favorite prose stylists to tell us where and when they think the movies got it right.

Rick Moody, whose novel The Ice Storm, became an award-winning film often captures the way drugs and alcohol are used as social lubricants. Richard Kadrey’s fantasy stories offers their own trippy perspective on the world. Elizabeth Wurtzel made history with Prozac Nation, the story of a different type of drug. British writer Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting was adapted into a film in 1996, setting a seductively disturbing vision of heroin addicts in Edinburgh. And Norman Spinrad’s science fiction stories, novels and scripts are not concerned precisely with drugs, but rather offer up an imagination always thinking outside of normal expectations and perceptions.