Man Without a Shadow

By Colin Wilson

Gerard Sorme thinks the key to a more meaningful life lies in an expansion of human consciousness, and he believes that one way to expand it is through sexual experiences. He sets out to record in diary form his sexual encounters with various women: the middle-aged Gertrude, her teenage niece Caroline, and Diana, the wife of a mad composer determined to adapt Varney the Vampire into an opera. But Sorme finds his beliefs and ideas challenged when he meets the fascinating and dangerous Caradoc Cunningham, who seems to possess occult powers and who has developed his own methods of expanding consciousness through drugs, orgies, and black magic. And when Cunningham is targeted by his enemies, fellow occultists who he believes are directing the powers of evil spirits at him, Sorme will find himself caught up in Cunningham’s peril, culminating in his participation in a bizarre and frightening ritual. . . . 

First published in 1963, Man Without a Shadow explores Wilson's philosophy in the form of a black magic thriller that draws on inspirations as diverse as the writings of Aleister Crowley and Montague Summers, Huysmans's Là-bas, and the ‘penny dreadfuls’ of Thomas Prest. This 50th anniversary edition includes the unabridged text of the first British edition and a new introduction by Wilson scholar Colin Stanley.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valancourt Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781939140272

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MAN WITHOUT A SHADOW

The Diary of an Existentialist

COLIN WILSON

With a new introduction by

COLIN STANLEY

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Man Without a Shadow by Colin Wilson

First published London: Arthur Barker, 1963

First Valancourt Books edition 2013

Copyright © 1963 by Colin Wilson

Introduction © 2013 by Colin Stanley

The right of Colin Wilson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

INTRODUCTION

Man Without a Shadow: The Diary of an Existentialist was Colin Wilson’s fourth novel, originally published in the United Kingdom by Arthur Barker Ltd. in 1963. It was the second in the ‘Gerard Sorme Trilogy’, preceded by Ritual in the Dark (1960) and completed by The God of the Labyrinth in 1970. The title refers to the novel Peter Schlemihl by Adelbert von Chamisso—about a man who regrets trading his shadow in exchange for wealth—and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Story of the Lost Reflection’. All this did not impress the American publishers, Dial Press, who insisted on changing the title to The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme. In 1988, Ronin Publishing reissued it as The Sex Diary of a Metaphysician.

The novel continues, more-or-less, where Ritual in the Dark left off and ties up some of its loose ends. Many of the personnel are carried over although the strong character of Austin Nunne (still referred to at times in the text) is replaced by the larger-than-life Caradoc Cunningham. Man Without a Shadow can, however, still be enjoyed as a completely separate work.

In his autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose (2004), Wilson revealed that the novel was initially proposed by Maurice Girodias, editor of Olympia Press, the Paris publisher who specialised in ‘obscene’ books: The idea appealed to me. In 1962, the police were still able to seize any book they considered indecent. And I liked to be allowed to write frankly about sex (Wilson (1), 228). When he mentioned this to his mainstream publishers, Arthur Barker Ltd., they asked to see the manuscript and decided to publish it themselves in a slightly amended version. It was not all plain sailing however: it had to be cleared in court before it could be sold in England and in a subsequent court case in Boston, where the book was described as obscene: "The judge . . . disagreed, saying that it was no worse than Henry Miller or Lady Chatterley . . ." (Wilson (1), 249).

Man Without a Shadow brings together several of Wilson’s interests, including philosophy, sex, and the occult. When his now classic study The Occult was published in 1971, some critics, fans, and scholars of his previous non-fiction—particularly the ‘Outsider Cycle’ in which he had created his ‘New Existentialism’ and established himself as a philosopher of some note—were surprised, others downright horrified. They found this step into the rather contentious unknown—abandoning the rigours of philosophy for, in their opinion, more trivial topics—mystifying. Wilson, they felt, was merely jumping onto the occult bandwagon in order to make money.

Readers of his fiction, however, were definitely not taken by surprise and had no such qualms about his serious foray into the subject; for occult instances and anecdotes abound in all of his novels from Ritual in the Dark onwards. Indeed, Wilson himself informed us that as a twenty-year-old, living in rented accommodation in London with his wife and young child, forced to work in various dead-end factory jobs—long before the publication of his first book, The Outsider, in 1956—he read all the books on magic and mysticism that he could find in libraries, not just as an escape from his lot but ". . . because they confirmed my intuition of another order of reality, an intenser and more powerful form of consciousness than the kind I seemed to share" (Wilson (2), 46) and by the time he came to write The Occult, in the late 1960s, had apparently accumulated a library of over five hundred volumes on the subject. And in Man Without a Shadow his interest in the occult became very apparent.

Although presented in the form of a diary, the novel has two distinct sections: before and after Sorme meets Caradoc Cunningham. The first part concentrates on Sorme’s ideas about sex and his actual sexual exploits; the second introduces the fascinating character of Cunningham, who is based on Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the sometimes outrageous occultist, mystic, magician, poet, and mountaineer. Here sexuality combines with the occult. Sorme writes:

Of one thing I am certain. The sexual force is the nearest thing to magic—to the supernatural—that human beings ever experience. It deserves perpetual and close study. No study is so profitable to the philosopher. In the sex force, he can watch the purpose of the universe in action. (Wilson (4), 27)

Crowley clearly fascinates Wilson: chapter seven of The Occult, ‘The Beast Himself’, was dedicated to him, and later, in 1987, he wrote a short biography, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast.

Wilson has also revealed that there was a certain amount of autobiography in Man Without a Shadow: It was a pleasure to write, for I enjoyed telling the story of my own sex life in a slightly fictionalised form (Wilson (1), 229). Human sexuality was very much on his mind at that time, as he was concurrently writing a non-fiction book, the fifth in the ‘Outsider Cycle’, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, also released in 1963:

Ritual in the Dark had been closely connected to The Outsider, and I now found it natural to write a novel and a ‘philosophical book’ at about the same time. Ideas tended to shape themselves into characters and events. Origins of the Sexual Impulse was followed by the novel, Man Without a Shadow. (Wilson (3), 235-6)

And in the ‘Note by Gerard Sorme’, which preceded the novel, Sorme (i.e. Wilson) describes how his diaries had come into the public domain, an event that had actually happened to him in 1957 when his journals were splashed all over the tabloid press after a much publicised incident in which his future father-in-law threatened him with a horse-whip.

A story or a novel, wrote Wilson, "is a writer’s attempt to create a clear self-image" (Wilson (3), 21):

His purpose in writing is bound up with his sense of identity. If he has no clear sense of identity, or if his self-image is blurred . . . he may still be able to observe and describe the world around him accurately. But he will be incapable of creating anything large. (Wilson (3), 23)

Sorme is deeply concerned with his own sense of ‘inauthentic existence’, a classic theme of existential literature (hence the sub-title of the original UK edition). He is the man without a shadow or a reflection. Life flows through him and although things happen to him the experience is frustratingly incomplete. He writes the sex diary in an attempt to see his own face, to ‘remember himself’.

Man Without a Shadow is—along with the majority of Wilson’s fiction—a novel of ideas, a form he defends in his Preface. By this he means not merely a novel that plays superficially with ideas but one that is fuelled and driven by them. Contemporary reviewers were mostly unconvinced by this and reactions to Man Without a Shadow were—as usual with any Wilson title at that time—mixed; but later, more considered, assessments by Wilson scholars rated it much higher. R. H. W. Dillard saw the novel as one of Wilson’s most interesting, for the ideas are at the surface, and the sexual intensity drives them along (Dillard, 145). Howard F. Dossor thought that it . . . remains an important statement of the philosophy of the Outsider and that it . . . reflects man in the attitude of exploring his own sexuality and it does so with an intellectual honesty that is all too rare in the field (Dossor, 259). Professor John A. Weigel, in his assessment, concluded:

Colin Wilson does not play games comfortably. Thus his fiction, no matter how deliberately he may try to make it light or sardonic, usually comes out solemnly didactic. Man Without a Shadow, because of the subject matter, certainly seems to exaggerate reality, as pornography, by definition, is meant to do; but one comes away from the book, if he has read it in good faith, convinced that it is not pornography. One believes that Wilson did intend to tell the truth about sex intelligently and accurately. (Weigel, 81-82)

See what you think . . .

Colin Stanley

Nottingham

February 22, 2013

Colin Stanley (b. 1952) is the published bibliographer of Colin Wilson, editor of Colin Wilson Studies (a series of books and booklets about Wilson’s work written by scholars worldwide), author of two experimental novels and a volume of nonsense verse, and has written and edited several volumes pertaining to Wilson. He now runs a publishing company in Nottingham, Paupers’ Press. His vast collection of Wilson’s work has recently been acquired by the University of Nottingham.

References:

Dillard, R. H. W. ‘Toward an Existential Realism: The Novels of Colin Wilson’ in Stanley, Colin (ed.) Colin Wilson, A Celebration: Essays and Recollections. London: Cecil Woolf, 1988.

Dossor, Howard F. Colin Wilson: The Man and his Mind. Shaftesbury: Element Books, 1990.

Weigel, John A. Colin Wilson (Twayne’s English Authors Series, no. 181). Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1975.

Wilson, Colin (1). Dreaming to Some Purpose. London: Century, 2004.

Wilson, Colin (2). The Occult. St Albans: Mayflower Books, 1973.

Wilson, Colin (3). The Craft of the Novel. Bath: Ashgrove Press, 1986.

Wilson, Colin (4). The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme. London: Pan Books, 1968.

MAN WITHOUT A SHADOW

With Love for Joy and Sally

PREFACE

For me, there is one simple objection to novels: they get nowhere.

Consider the following Zen stories, quoted by Dr Suzuki:

‘Hsueh Feng once asked Chang-ch’ing, who came up to see the master in his room, What is that? Said Chang: Fine weather, just the day for outdoor work.

‘Another time, seeing a monk pass by, Hsueh Feng beckoned him to approach, and asked, Where are you going? The monk answered: I am going to join the general work. Said the master: Then go.’

These two stories are pointless; I very much doubt whether they are intended to have any deep symbolic meaning. But when you have read a dozen such Zen anecdotes, an interesting thing happens: you suddenly observe something about the working of your own mind. You expect the anecdote to have a ‘punch’ in the last line; when it doesn’t come, a peculiar sense of frustration arises. What the mind has been cheated of is a meaning. We say irritably: ‘That story is meaningless.’ Unless its events serve a function—to support the meaning—we feel them to be unjustified. But does that mean that the anecdote itself is meaningless, simply because it lacks a ‘punch’? Or is it not true that we allow the ‘punch’ in a ‘good anecdote’ to bear the whole burden of meaning, robbing the rest of the story of its significance?

This enables me to explain what troubles me about the novel, as it has existed in England since Defoe and Richardson. It flows onward quietly, apparently getting to its ‘point’. But what is its point? That Pamela marries Mr B——, that Robinson Crusoe dies peacefully in his bed? We are willing to accept these as the point; this enables us to put the book down and forget it. But therein lies the unsatisfactori­ness of the whole tradition of the novel. It is as pointless as a boiled sweet.

I would be the first to agree that this pointlessness is the price that must be paid for the unique qualities of the novel. The novel form confers a strange freedom on the writer. Compare, for example, the critical writings of John Cowper Powys with his best novels. From The Art of Growing Old or The Pleasures of Literature, you would assume that here is some feeble-minded, garrulous old maid, a kind of literary Aunt Tabitha; you can almost hear the knitting pins clicking as he rambles on. What is there to prepare you for the sweep, the power, the impact, of Jobber Skald, Wolf Solent or A Glastonbury Romance? Here, the division is so marked that Powys might be two different authors. In others it is less so; but no one rates the Tolstoy of What is Art? with the Tolstoy of War and Peace. Yes, the novel undoubtedly enables a man to express powers that he would find otherwise inexpressible. Think of Anthony Trollope, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Mann: who would have sus­pected these men of being magicians if they had been greengrocers or coal merchants? Would they have known themselves? I doubt it.

But the price paid for this freedom is heavy; the novelist is confined to a merry-go-round of human emotions—that is to say, of story. If you will take the trouble to plough through the fifteen hundred pages of Jean Christophe or War and Peace or Clarissa, you will experience an effect exactly like that of the Zen anecdotes I quoted a page ago—particularly if you take them on a long train journey, and keep on reading even when you begin to feel tired. As new develop­ments and complications ensue, you will begin to feel: ‘So what?’ For two hundred pages, you will follow the fortunes of your heroes and heroines, waiting impatiently for the moment when they tumble into bed, or for the triumphs and revelations of character. But a point comes when you realize that your normal enjoyment of these triumphs depends upon your sense that something is now achieved. When the book goes off into further vistas of complication, you realize that this sense of completion is illusory.

The truth of the matter seems to be this: that a novel is ‘justified’ in so far as it gives you a holiday from yourself. Most stories really get nowhere when they are examined critically. If you read a volume of philosophy, you may feel at the end as if you have arrived at a goal—although whether it satisfies you is a different matter. At the end of War and Peace or Jobber Skald, you feel as if you have been on an interesting circular tour on a bus, but you dismount at the same place where you got on. If the novel is short—or if it is read in small doses—then the goal is not important; you will have made an interesting excursion into new territory, and feel refreshed. If the novel is long, and you keep on reading to find out what happens next, your sense of freshness will disappear; you will cease to enjoy the scenery, and you will be suddenly struck by the futility of a circular bus tour.

In the days when the novel was young, its authors were un­sophisticated enough to feel that the story was the main thing. Homer did not ask whether Ulysses would experience a sense of anti-climax when he settled back in Ithaca; the author of the Book of Job evidently felt that ‘He lived happily ever after’ was a perfectly satisfactory ending. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that authors began to recognize that the end of the voyage, after all, is less important than the scenery on the way. Many of the earliest novels of the eighteenth century were told in letters; this meant that they had very little ‘scenery’, and were read entirely for the sake of the story. When Flaubert recognized that the goal is not so important as what happens on the way, the novel underwent a certain purification. Instead of getting the story told anyhow—with letters, journals, etc.—it was felt that the novel must try for a kind of inner-unity, and that far more attention must be lavished on the reality of individual scenes. If the novel is going to ‘take you out of yourself’, then it is up to the novelist to make his world as convincing as possible.

But even Flaubert and Turgenev were ‘impure’, and wrote books that were not remarkable for architecture. It is Henry James who represents the ‘means before ends’ school at its purest; his books are ritual dances, minuets of events. James seemed to imply: ‘There is one way of telling every story that is the right way, the only perfect way; and if the story is studied hard enough—like a mathematical problem—the right way will finally dawn on the author.’ His prefaces are delightful because, like an enthusiastic mathematician, he enjoys telling you in detail how he approached the problem.

These comments are not intended to imply criticism of James. It is too easy to say that what his novels gain in form they lose in content, that so much mathematical perfection is lifeless. It is not vitality that they lack; The Ambassadors is at least as alive as Barchester Towers. It is real intellectual perception, real moral judgement. Their fault is that they are not intellectual enough. James was ingenious in solving the problems he set himself; but he never asked if they were worth solving. There was an interesting exchange of letters between Shaw and James about the latter’s dramatization of his Owen Wingrave. Owen Wingrave is a ghost story about a young pacifist who defies the ghost of a militant ancestor, proving his moral courage, but dying in the process. Shaw wrote: ‘What the play wants is a third act by your father.’ (Henry James senior was the creator of a most interesting religious system.) He went on to insist that Owen Wingrave must win and live; the present ending was cowardice. He ended: ‘People don’t want works of art from you; they want help.’ Shaw was right, and James’s reply—an impassioned defence of the absolute value of art—missed the point. James’s artistic aims, as far as they went, were excellent. We have only to read his Notebooks to see that his stories always came to him as sudden insights, as visions, with a unique vitality of their own, as difficult to preserve as a rare perfume; the task he set himself was to create a jar that would hold every drop of the perfume and not allow it to evaporate. He does this superbly well. But having had the ‘vision’ for the story, he forgets all other ends but the immediate one of how to tell it perfectly. The result is that his work is suffused with the defeatism of his age (he himself recognized that much of his defeatism was romantic self-indulgence).

Shaw was striking at the heresy that underlies the whole theory of the novel. Because the story usually gets nowhere, this is no reason for making it a basic principle that the story should not try to get anywhere. And yet this was the theory that had been tacitly accepted by the novelists of the late nineteenth century. Tolstoy was right when he declared that his ‘moral writings’ were as important as his novels. The theory of ‘absolute art’ gave its followers an excuse for ceasing to develop as human beings. When examined closely, most of the followers of Flaubert and Zola prove to be moral adolescents, like their masters. Flaubert’s immature world-rejection reappears in the arrested romanticism of Gissing, Moore, Bennett, Maupassant, Huysmans, Joyce and Oscar Wilde. All escape the burden of moral responsibility by pretending it is none of the artist’s business.

Joyce may be taken as the representative symbol of this attitude. Art, he declared, should be static. Beauty is a stasis. Art that ‘gets anywhere’ is impure. Nevertheless, his doctrine was not completely negative, for, like James, he considered that it is the task of the artist to somehow bottle the ‘essence’ of reality. This movement of art for art’s sake was partly a revolt against the shallowness of pure intellect and the rationalism of the eighteenth century. Intellect, they felt, was powerless to deal with the essence of life. The novel may be a lowlier form than the scientific treatise, and yet it can bottle the essence with an efficiency that is beyond the reach of the intellect. This is true enough; it is the next step of the argument that is doubtful: that therefore the novel has no concern with ‘ends’ in the sense that they are understood by the intellect. It is not surprising that critics thought that Ulysses represented the end of the novel. For it is true that, in certain respects, Ulysses is superior to anything that has preceded it. It is realler. There is a chapter that parodies the styles of earlier writers, from Malory to George Eliot, and Joyce’s purpose seems to be to show that he is, in a certain sense, superior to them all. And he is. But the critics could only observe that, in gaining this superior degree of reality, he had left behind everything that constituted the novel. This tendency had already been apparent—in Bennett, for example, whose best work is impressive because it is so like ‘everyday life’, with its detail and its boredom. Ulysses seemed to imply that the evolution of the novel—towards increasing ‘reality’—had led to a fastidious distaste for storytelling. Finnegans Wake showed this process taken a stage further; in his desire to ignore the novelist’s meaningless procession of cause and effect, Joyce tried to turn the novel into the pure essence of reality; it could be described as ‘history from a God’s eye view’. And it certainly indicated that, if the novel strives for ‘reality’ instead of the futility of events, it must halt in a cul de sac.

But this view need only be accepted if we accept the Jamesian supposition. If, instead, we accept Shaw’s point of view, there is an alternative. Joyce assumed that there are only two paths for the novel to take: into the futility of a story that can never have a real ending (because life goes on), or into a kind of mystical search for ‘reality’ that regards the story as an irrelevance on a lower plane. The second is the more difficult alternative, and it is to Joyce’s credit that he took it. But there is a third possibility, more difficult than either of the others. This consists in trying to tell a story, but to raise the story to the level of reality. One might say that the ideal story for this type of novel would be the life story of a saint who finally achieves ‘trans­cendent reality’. If the novelist could describe this reality in such a way that the reader was transported into it, this would be the ideally great novel, for it would move on the level of a story, yet end by bringing the reader to ‘reality’. Melville, Hesse and Dostoevsky have all attempted this kind of novel (which E. M. Forster calls ‘prophetic’). No one has yet written one that was even a partial success in trans­porting the reader towards ‘reality’.

Of necessity, these prophetic novels are, to some extent, novels of ideas, for one of their aims is to change their readers’ ideas. The novel of ideas had, of course, been known to the nineteenth century—Rousseau, Peacock—even Landor moves in this direction. But this was a rather dilettantish flirting with ideas, not an attempt to get closer to ‘reality’. Dostoevsky was the first of this new class of novelists of ideas: the type of man who wants to get closer to reality, and is willing to make use of argument for part of the time. There are few others. The finest—and most underestimated—novelist of this class was H. G. Wells. His early books have a facile pessimism. He can write about the end of the world—in The Time Machine—or the cruelty of nature—in The Island of Dr Moreau—with the indifference of a Maupassant. This period lasted about ten years, but by 1906 he was well out of it, and had written his indictment of human stupidity The Food of the Gods, and his vision of a transformed humanity in Days of the Comet. In Tono Bungay (1909) he already shows the characteristic that distinguished all his later work: a desire to write with urgency about real problems—the problems he felt at the time of writing—as well as telling a story. Sometimes, the result was superb, as in Mr Polly. Sometimes it was indifferent, as in Marriage. In The Undying Fire, he rises to an intensity that compares with Dostoevsky. In The World of William Clissold he tries to make the novel as big as life, and fails. And yet every one of his novels of ideas is as readable today as when it was published. And this is not because of their ‘ideas’ (ideas date quickly), but because of the furious sincerity of Wells’s mind trying to probe the question of whether life is meaningless. Even when he writes indifferently, as in Secret Places of the Heart and Star Begotten, he writes with a passion that compels the reader’s respect. In my own opinion, Wells’s work after Tono Bungay is in every way more interesting than the early science fiction (in spite of its excellence and pace), and remains so to the very end.

It seems to me that the controversy between Wells and James over Wells’s book Boon is another example of those tragic misunder­standings that are so frequent in the history of art. James is the more excusable of the two. He was prevented from understanding Wells’s originality because of the cloud of controversy in which Wells always moved. Besides, Wells was popular, rich and influential; James, living in a country of philistines, never gained the recognition he deserved; he would have been inhuman not to feel a certain envy of Wells. But Wells had no reason for envy; he was simply pig­-headed. And yet, together with Shaw and D. H. Lawrence, he was the most vital and revolutionary spirit of his generation.

As a novelist, Wells lacked what James possessed—the desire to give his books reality, even if it took a thousand fine brush strokes. He can write well only about his own life and experiences, but not about other people’s. Still, what he wanted to do to the novel was in no way as old-fashioned as the followers of Joyce and Eliot pre­tended. Where William Clissold is good, it is good in exactly the same way as The Waste Land or the Night Town scene of Ulysses—electric with feeling, with personal intensity. As an experimental novel, Clissold is as bold as Ulysses and, in its own way, as successful. And, like Ulysses, it shows that the old forms of the novel are inadequate. Page for page, it contains about as many dull pages as Ulysses—except that Ulysses is dull with arid experimenta­tion and naturalistic description, and Clissold with arid chunks of politics or sociology. Both have a vitality that can overcome this.

In this preface, I am concerned with the problems and cul de sacs of Clissold rather than those of Ulysses, because it is plain to me that the problems of this present novel are of the same nature as Wells’s.

What I would like to do—what I feel it will be one day possible to do—is to write a white dwarf of a book, a book that is so dense that it can be read fifty times.1 Not a book of ideas, in the sense that my Outsider is a book of ideas, but a book that deals with life with the same directness that we are compelled to live it. Naturally, such a book could not be a ‘good novel’ under our present definitions, although it might succeed in having a certain internal unity, and in telling a story. The simplest objection to the novel of ideas (in the Peacock sense) is that ideas are dead, while a good book should somehow be a living organism, with many levels of significance, like a picture that can be looked at in a dozen different ways. But are there not ideas that have this vitality? After all, Faust and Man and Superman could be called plays of ideas; this does not stop them from being artistic masterpieces in the fullest sense.

1 A white dwarf is a star whose molecules have collapsed, so that a piece the size of a pea may weigh many tons.

I approached this problem in Ritual in the Dark, to which this present novel is a sequel. There I failed, and contented myself with a compromise—a novel that ‘told a story’, and got in the ideas wherever it could, provided they never held up the action, as in Clissold.

In the present book, I have side-stepped all the problems. By casting the book in the form of a diary, I have turned back to the form of novel that Flaubert abandoned as impure. By making its central subject sex, I have helped myself to an unfair advantage. From either point of view—that of Defoe or Joyce—it cannot be called a novel. But I am less concerned with what to call it than with trying to guess what ultimate form is implied by its internal laws. For while writing it, I have been aware that saying things in this way is a necessity. There ought to be a type of book that makes a frontal assault on ‘reality’

Reviews for Man Without a Shadow

[denerah2erzebet2bath · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Exciting and fast paced storytelling with a healthy dose of reflection. In other words, this novel has everything readers would expect from Colin Wilson, especially if they enjoyed his Outsider series and his non-fiction books on the occult and psychic powers. Best if read after 'Ritual in the Dark', as this is a direct sequel thereof.