Colin Wilson (1931-2013)

Wow. I found out that Colin Wilson died yesterday, after suffering a stroke the summer last year which made him lose the ability to speak. Man, I went through such a Wilson phase from 2008-2011. He was so perfectly suited for the Hopper’s reading: philosophy, horror, out-and-out weirdity. Though I moved on, I will have to return to his quite extensive body of work and revisit the madness.

Who was he, exactly? Well, his work – at least the handful of books of his I read – explored the human condition and its potential. Beginning from a somewhat existentialist view point (The Outsider, 1956), he took a Frankensteinian detour with a semi-pseudo-scientific exploration of how man’s latent mental powers could be developed (The Mind Parasites, 1967, and The Philosopher’s Stone, 1969). Then, he turned to the outright weird, paranormal, cryptozoological, history’s-mysteries, and goofy, such as The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved (2000). Plus about forty or fifty other books.

I enjoyed his writing, particularly his fiction, because he was so different from the average science fiction or horror writer. He wrote clinically, cleanly, as if preparing the novel for reading at the 121st convention of the Academy of Physical Studies in Norway. Yet that did not mask the dread or the fantastic that underlied the stuff of his I’ve read. His work so intrigued me that I don’t believe I reviewed it anywhere on this blog, the only author whose work I feel I was not up to the task of a full-fledged review and critique.

Well, I did come across this, published during a re-reading of The Mind Parasites, which I did in the summer of 2010 (I read it the first time in three days, was so overwhelmed at the sheer uniqueness of the work, then re-read it slowly over the course of ten days later in the month):


When you teach a man that he has been completely mistaken about his own nature all his life, it is as unsettling as suddenly giving him a million pounds. Or it is like taking a sexually frustrated man, and giving him the run of a harem. He suddenly discovers that he can turn on moods of poetry like a tap, that he can heat up his emotions to a kind of incandescence. He realizes, with a shock, that he has been handed the key to greatness: that all the world’s so-called ‘great men’ were men who had a mere glimmering of these powers which he now possesses in abundance. But he has spent all his life taking a relatively modest view of himself. His old personality has achieved a certain density through thirty or forty years of habit. It refuses to wither away overnight. But the new personality is also exceptionally powerful. He becomes a battle ground of two personalities. And he wastes an enormous amount of energy in all this confusion.

Colin Wilson’s book The Mind Parasites has a strange and powerful fascination over me. I’m in the process of re-reading the book, and right now I’m about three-quarters done with the second read.

It’s a strange book; I don’t think I’ve ever quite read anything like it. Wilson is a philosopher by trade, steeped in existentialism, and I’ve read some of his non-fiction works. But he’s dabbled in everything from that to this to true crime to fringe paranormal. His works are always on my list of books to seek out.

To give you the best idea of what The Mind Parasites is like, assuming you’re familiar with the following authors, it’s something like equal parts

H. P. Lovecraft
George Gurdjieff
Ayn Rand

and the philosophical methods and methodology of Edmund Husserl, of which I’m woefully ignorant but of whom seems extremely interesting. Why oh why didn’t I major in philosophy at college? Oh yeah, because I thought I would never be able to get a job. Wait a minute …

Anyway, a review of The Mind Parasites will be forthcoming, probably in a week or ten days, and will be of greater depth than I generally do for the books I read, simply because I find this one so intensely fascinating.

. . . . .

Which is as close to a review as your gonna get, since I never did write one.

One final note: I did purchase his one of his Spider World books, thinking it might be a kick to read since I have a healthy – perhaps unhealthy – fear of spiders. Mistake! These spiders are car-sized and rule the planet, mankind obviously included. Lots of nastiness happens that I couldn’t bring myself to read past page ten. Shudders and shivers and bad images in my brain I will never get out. Oh well.

Also, I see in an online biography he wrote a book on Jorge Luis Borges. Don’t know anything about it, but I do know that I have similar literary feelings toward the great Argentinian writer as well. Definitely going on my Acquisitions List.

Rest in peace, great writer.