Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was an English writer who wrote fiction, including horror and science fiction, works on philosophy, especially philosophy in the Gurdjieff and Existentialist traditions, and nonfiction books on the occult. His novels included Lovecraftian elements, such as cosmic horror and impersonal if hostile entities from outer space. Writing in the 1970s, his works are also more overtly sexual and explicitly violent than those of earlier writers.
Wilson's The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962) devoted a chapter to Lovecraft, "that man of dubious genius" who "carried on a lifelong guerrilla warfare against civilisation and materialism." Calling him a "sick," "horrifying figure" who "rejected 'reality'," Wilson charged that Lovecraft's "closest relation is with Peter Kurten, the Dusseldorf murderer, who admitted that his days in solitary confinement were spent conjuring up sexual-sadistic fantasies." Although insisting that Lovecraft is "a very bad writer," he grants him "something of the same kind of importance as Kafka"; Wilson predicts, "Possibly future generations will feel that Lovecraft is ‘symbolically true’."The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination, Colin Wilson (Houghton, 1962).
Challenged by August Derleth in the wake of this criticism to show that he could do it better, Wilson produced The Mind Parasites (1967), published by Arkham House, in which humanity is bedeviled by creatures called Tsathogguans. (In a preface, Wilson avers that Lovecraft, "far more than Hemingway or Faulkner, or even Kafka, is a symbol of the outsider-artist in the 20th century".) Wilson then wrote "The Return of the Lloigor", first published in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969), which turned Derleth's minor Great Old One Lloigor into an alien species of psychic vampires--a depiction that has influenced subsequent writers, including Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrison.Wikipedia, "Lloigor".
== Selected Bibliography ==
=== Fiction ===
* The Mind Parasites (1967)
* The Philosopher's Stone (1969) (Reprinted, Valancourt Books, 2013)
* "The Return of the Lloigor" (first published 1969 in the anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos; revised separate edition, Village Press, London, 1974).
* The Space Vampires (1976)
* Spider World: The Tower (1987)
* Spider World: The Delta (1987)
* Spider World: The Magician (1992)
* The Tomb of the Old Ones (novella published as half of a double volume alongside a novella by John Grant, 2002)
* Spider World: Shadowland (2002)
=== Nonfiction ===
* The Outsider (1956)
* The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962)
* The Occult: A History (1971)
* Order of Assassins (1972)
== References ==
Category:Deceased (Real World)
Category:Mythos-Adjacent Authors