A Graun piece on Colin Wilson, the reclusive misfit who wrote the Great British Existentialist Novel and then squandered his newly acquired status putting out over 100 books on outré subjects such as serial killers, UFOs, cults and Atlantis, as well as the odd Lovecraftean horror story, who has just published his 110th book, his second autobiography:
His philosophy is basically existentialism with non-rational excrescences and characterised by bizarre nomenclature - Faculty X, Upside Downness, Peak Experiences, Right Men, The Dominant Five Per Cent, King Rats. It seems to constitute an attempt to classify human feelings and behaviour as written by a Martian who has never met an Earthling. This is, of course, Wilson's weakness and also, in a way, his charm - he has no understanding of other people whatever. When I ask if he would say he is low in emotional intelligence, he readily agrees: 'That is fair, yes.'
He is exceptionally tolerant of nutters and happy to engage in long correspondence with people who have theories about, say, alien abduction - or with Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, with whom he corresponded for 10 years till Brady dumped him. But ordinary social contact - apart from with his family - seems completely missing from his life. Missing, but not missed. He says that about 10 years ago Joy insisted on going out for a drink on New Year's Eve. 'We finished off drinking champagne at midnight in our local pub and it took me a year to shake off all the people that I'd met!'

Posted by: Jim | http:// | Mon May 31 15:24:14 2004

Got a couple of books of his; not "The Outsider" but the more pataphysical stuff - there's a wonderful one called "The Dark Gods" in which he claims that the Lloigor - Lovecraft's Great Old Ones - are real. Pretty much David Icke territory.

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Mon May 31 16:02:57 2004

He had a story about the Lloigor, something about Wales being the lost continent of Mu and the Lloigor's deadly orgone emanations causing spikes of perverted crime or something. I suspect that Shea and (R.A.) Wilson referenced him in the Illuminatus! books.

Btw, do you mean to say that he's serious about the Lloigor stuff?

Posted by: Ben | http:// | Tue Jun 1 03:37:23 2004

I always assumed that 'Colin Wilson' was a committee or an author's circle or something....just shows how wrong one can be.

Posted by: Jim | http:// | Wed Jun 2 10:11:06 2004

I think it's a PKD deal - he started off writing fiction and ended up thinking it was real, or at least a good metaphor for what's real. And I've read the Wales story too - he really doesn't like rural south Wales, does he?

Want to say something? Do so here.

Note to spammers: This comment system applies the rel=nofollow attribute to the poster's URL and all links. Posting links to this page will not improve their search engine rankings.

Display name:
URL:(optional)
To prove that you are not a bot, please enter the text in the image on the right in the field below it.

Your Comment:

Remember my details.

Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.

Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.