I have been on a reading jag lately, and I find myself reverting time and again to Colin Wilson’s work, currently his novels. Re-read Ritual in the Dark yesterday; re-reading The Glass Cage today. Probably I’ll go on to re-read Necessary Doubt, the novel of his I go back to most often. Once in a great while, I re-read The Mind Parasites, but not too often. That book changed my life: In an odd sort of way, to re-read it too often would be almost to devalue it. (I don’t claim this makes sense. It’s just how I feel about it.)
I remember Colin with such fondness and gratitude. It is literally not possible for me to imagine what my life would have been like, had I never come across his work. If I had never met him, never become friends with him, never published any of his books, he would still rank among the most important influences in my life.
Few things he wrote about failed to interest me. (His books on wine and on music didn’t do anything for me, but that is a fault of my testes, rather than of his readability.)
First for me came The Mind Parasites, in 1970, when I was 25 years old. Then, for decades, I read everything of his that I could find, fiction or non-fiction.
Finding those books wasn’t as easy as you might think, back in those pre-Amazon days. In my early years, economics mandated that I buy very few new books, almost none of them hardcovers. What I could afford was second-hand books, or books from libraries. For years and years, I carried a list of titles in my wallet, against unforeseen opportunities, because finding what you want by haunting used bookstores was chancy. You had to be in the right place at the right time (they didn’t have indexes of what they carried, so you were at the mercy of their alphabetizing) and had to work hard to be sure you weren’t missing something right under your nose. And of course, used bookstores were shrines to the Three Princes of Serendip, which often meant that the book that lightened your wallet wasn’t anything you had hoped to find.
As to libraries? Municipal libraries were likely to have a few of his books, but never many. Academic libraries were better prospects, but of course they weren’t a sure thing either. (And for all those years when I did not live near a university library, the opportunity was only theoretical.)
So suppose you’ve never read a single Colin Wilson. On the one hand, so much the worse for you. On the other hand, what a prospective feast you have in store for you! In no particular order except how they come to my mind:
(novels)
The Mind Parasites; Philosopher’s Stone; Necessary Doubt, The Glass Cage, and perhaps Ritual in the Dark. The Personality Surgeon (though it lets down badly in the final chapter, the rest is excellent). . The four-volume Spider World series.
(non-fiction)
The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel; Voyage to a Beginning; Alien Dawn; Dreaming to Some Purpose; The Books in My Lif;, the Starseekers; The Occult; Mysteries; After Life; Access to Inner Worlds.
If you can’t find entertainment and provocation in even one of these, you’re hard to please. But even if so, don’t give up. He wrote more than a hundred titles. Look around a little.