In The Excess Road, youth must pay a toll and the path to wisdom starts at the hilltop campus of Wessex College. There you can find a good party but you can also lose your mind like Joaquin Chandler did. He's an eighteen year old looking for love and his own trail to tread during his freshman year in 1993.The party scene at Wessex is overwhelming for Joaquin and even though he feels like an outcast the kid makes friends. Then the beautiful Elyssa comes along and his heart sets. The chase for her affection begins with an unsettling event but she enters his life. After an initiation into the grittier reality of college life, Joaquin discovers his new best friend Tim is the campus drug dealer and Elyssa is using him to get drugs. Anxiety attacks and hallucinations begin to haunt Joaquin after a bad LSD trip.Joaquin fights to regain control of his life as the anxiety attacks get worse. Then, at the end, a tragic events calls for a choice and change. He makes one.This book is not about happy endings and cliched epiphanies. It is about a young man whose worst enemy is himself and his existential struggles while dealing with a burgeoning mental-illness. And if you don't like pathetic fallacy, don't read this. For more sophisticated readers only.