on magic and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Francis King’s books on Crowley, reprints of works about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky; there were Stan Gooch’s books on Neanderthal man, Lyall Watson’s work on the paranormal, Geoffrey Ashe’s books on Glastonbury and the Arthurian Legends. Even respected names from an older generation, like Arthur Koestler, were devoting important works to phenomena like telepathy and synchronicity and attacking entrenched positions in scientific reductionism. And, of course, there was Colin Wilson. Maybe it was me, but it seemed that almost everything worth reading then was coming over the pond (and across the Rockies) from England. I always had a ‘thing’ for England and English writers—maybe that explains why I’ve wound up living here—but I can’t recall any American writers at the time who were producing anything like the sort of stuff I, and a handful of other esoteric Anglophiles, were greedily absorbing. Come to think of it, I can’t think of many now, either.
There seemed to be a ‘movement’ of some kind among these writers, an association of minds all concerned with a shared idea: the possibility of a breakthrough, a mutation or transformation in human consciousness. The limits of the Cartesian/Newtonian mechanistic dispensation were clear. Hard-line Darwinians had reduced human beings to pretentious apes, and in various forms academic psychology had practically made it a dogma that we were all little more than stimulus-response marionettes. Philosophy and literature too, were little better off. Anglo-American philosophy argued that all the interesting questions, those about meaning and purpose, were nonsense; their European counterparts were mired in neo-Marxist rhetoric or submerged in unreadable post-structuralism prose. And practically all ‘serious’ literature was dedicated to the proposition that human life was meaningless or, if it had any meaning at all, it was social, political or personal. There was nothing transcendental, nothing beyond the necessity of satisfying our immediate animal and political needs. The only area in which any sense of excitement, optimism and vision still remained was in the taboo realm of popular culture, in science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction. After more than a quarter of a century, it strikes me that, aside from a few exceptions, the climate still hasn’t changed that much.
It would have been a dreary time indeed for anyone with any enthusiasm for knowledge, purpose and heightened experience, if it weren’t for these great books coming over from the UK. And of all the books I assimilated then at a rate I find difficult to match or to even come close to now, none had so great and immediate an impact on me as The Mind Parasites. On one of my regular forages for Wilson’s books (which involved enormously long walks and bus rides, as I hadn’t yet learned to drive, and being without a car in LA is a form of madness) I found an old US paperback edition. It was a Bantam, I think; sadly, I no longer have it, a result of having shipped my library across countries and oceans too many times. But that copy became the focus of a kind of ‘cult’. After I read it I loaned it to a friend, and after he read it, he did the same. Because we had enjoyed it so much, even people who had no interest in science fiction or ‘higher consciousness’ read it, and for a while it was a kind of joke to raise an eyebrow and, nodding knowingly, say “mind parasites, eh?,” whenever anything went wrong.
On my first reading I burned through it in a day or two, only breaking away for necessities like sleep and band practice. Then I read it again, more slowly and deliberately, taking time to copy out scores of passages, meditating on lines like “Human intelligence is a function of man’s evolutionary urge; the scientist and philosopher hunger for truth because they are tired of being merely human.” “The greatest human problem is that we are all tied to the present.” “Man is a continent, but his conscious mind is no larger than a back garden…man consists almost entirely of unrealized potentials.” “I cannot be contented to know that the endless realms of mind now lie open for man’s exploration; this does not seem enough.”
I could go on, but the problem with picking out stimulating one-liners like these is the same problem I encountered when I first began to copy out the many aphorisms that pop up in Wilson’s gripping narrative like sign posts on the way to the Absolute: when do you stop? I found back then that I could easily wind up simply copying the book itself. And now, having re-read it again nearly thirty years after my first encounter (and at this point I have no idea how many times I have re-read it), I still find the same problem. In many ways it strikes me that the narrative, as compulsive as any good thriller, is really an excuse to get to these hard gems of thought. Most readers know that Wilson wrote the book in response to a challenge by August Derleth, best known as the man responsible for saving the weird writer H.P. Lovecraft’s work from undeserved pulp oblivion. But although the interdimensional horrors that plague mankind are cut from Lovecraftian cloth, they are really only an excuse for Wilson’s protagonists to plunge into a dizzying exploration of their own minds. The real subject of the novel is human consciousness, and in many ways I emerged from my recent rereading with the feeling that the real ‘mind parasites’ are ourselves. We take our minds, our inner worlds, for granted, and do practically nothing to develop their real potential. That this potential exists, and that it is, if not limitless, at least far greater than any of us ever suspect, is the message that Wilson, in dozens of books, has been trying to get across to his readers for half a century. In The Mind Parasites he does this in an entirely new way; at least I can’t think of another book that brings together as disparate influences as Lovecraft, Husserl’s phenomenology, the history of consciousness and the Romantic movement under the same page-turning narrative roof. Or perhaps that is not entirely correct, as Wilson pulled the trick off again when he followed up The Mind Parasites with its sequel, The Philosopher’s Stone, which many consider his finest novel. I hope that this reissue of Wilson’s first existential-horror classic is successful enough for its publishers to consider bringing The Philosopher’s Stone back in print as well. And then there’s The Space Vampires…
Novel? Well, I guess that’s a matter of opinion. There isn’t the character development that we usually associate with novels. This book, along with all of Wilson’s fictions, is really a fable of ideas, philosophical investigations that use the form of the novel—with story, action, characters and dialogue—to embody an exploration of reality. The medium is not looked upon with much encouragement these days, but Plato employed it, as later did Borges, so it has a respected pedigree. Wilson once scandalized the English literary establishment by stating that H.G. Wells was probably the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, and that his late novels—which many consider rather poor examples of his genius—were the most important of the many he wrote. Perverse opinion for its own sake? No; Wilson rates Wells highly because Wells used the novel to attack reality, not merely to portray it accurately, or even to explain it (and God help us from the spate of books ‘explaining’ everything nowadays), but to dig into it, to break open its complacent surface and get to the fiery life beneath. The only other novelist that Wilson rated as highly was the Austrian Robert Musil, author of the unfinishable philosophical epic, The Man Without Qualities. Readers of The Mind Parasites may not share Wilson’s opinion on Wells, but they may feel, I think, that after reading this welcomed republication, that they have something like a literary pickaxe in their hands.
—GARY LACHMAN
January 2005, London
ORIGINAL PREFACE BY COLIN WILSON
THE STORY OF HOW I came to write a ‘Lovecraft novel’ for Arkham House is a curious one. Several years back—it must have been about 1959—I had stopped at the Dorset farm of an old friend—an American named Mark Helfer. The setting of this place would have delighted Lovecraft. The small town of Corfe Castle is little more than a village, with winding streets and an ancient inn that sells superb beer. The castle itself is an impressive ruin dating back to the seventh century, and from its ramparts you can look out over the ‘wind blasted furze’ of Hardy’s Egdon Heath. To get to Mark Helfer’s farm, you turn under an ancient bridge, then climb a steep and narrow road into the hills. And finally, on a high, exposed hilltop, you reach the grey stone farmhouse, many hundreds of years old, with its thick walls and tiny windows. Its ceilings are low; the floors are of stone slabs; it has that smell of age and coldness which is not unpleasant.
And there I lay in bed at half past eleven at night, the bedside lamp flickering (for the electricity was produced by a dynamo that thumped away in the distance), pleasantly drunk on Mark’s home