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One thing today’s kids miss out on is the ’60s and ’70s mass-market paperback. Nutbars ranting on YouTube or Rumble, or even ’80s-era New Age hokum, had nothing on the brilliantly bonkers world of the mass-market paperbacks of the era. They were everywhere, too. Even my mum, a thoroughly church-going Anglican, read stuff like Lobsang Rampa, the reincarnated Tibetan Lama who was really a plumber from Grimsby.
Chariots of the Gods, the Bermuda Triangle, suburban witches, Nostradamus: the wilder, the better. It wasn’t all fun with ancient aliens and reincarnated shamans, though. Some of them were reasonably serious, if decidedly credulous. One of my favourites was British writer Colin Wilson, the polymath philosopher, true crime writer and novelist and autodidact with a brilliant but often gullible mind and limited formal education. He published more than a hundred books during his career.
Born in 1931, the son of a Leicester shoe-factory worker, Wilson was early attracted to science. While attending Gateway Secondary Technical School, by age 14 he had already compiled a multi-volume work of essays covering many aspects of science and entitled A Manual of General Science. Leaving school at 16, he drifted through a succession of jobs, including the civil service and the air force, where he feigned homosexuality to get out of again. He drifted around Europe, married in London, but failed to find his feet. The marriage broke up, and by the mid-’50s, he was sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath and spending his days scribbling in the British Museum Reading Room. He worked and reworked a novel (Ritual in the Dark, which wasn’t published until 1960), but on Christmas Day, 1954, inspiration struck.
“It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun’s Hunger: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society. It was not a position I relished ... Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation. I began writing about it in my journal, trying to pin it down. And then, quite suddenly, I saw that I had the makings of a book. I turned to the back of my journal and wrote at the head of the page: ‘Notes for a book The Outsider in Literature’.”
Published in 1956 as The Outsider, the book was the turning-point of Wilson’s life. Overnight, he was hailed as Britain’s answer to Sartre and Camus, bundled in with the “Angry Young Men” alongside John Osborne. The press loved the rags-to-riches yarn.
But The Outsider wasn’t a tantrum against the Establishment. It was a scalpel through the postwar gloom. Wilson dissected the alienation of artists and thinkers – Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hemingway – who felt like strangers in their own skin. He wasn’t celebrating misery, he was diagnosing it. The book sold like hotcakes and made him famous. Then the literary establishment did what it always does to working-class upstarts who won’t keep playing the victim: it turned on him.
Wilson’s debt to and decisive break from Albert Camus is clearest here. Both men mapped the outsider’s estrangement from a meaningless world. Camus’ L’Étranger (variously translated as The Stranger or The Outsider) and Wilson’s study share the same chilly recognition that ordinary life feels thin and false. Yet where Camus counselled stoic revolt – Sisyphus must imagine himself happy, rolling his rock “without appeal” – Wilson saw only a dead end.
In Introduction to the New Existentialism and later essays, he called the old existentialism (Camus, Sartre, Heidegger) a “confession of private hopes and fears” that mistook contingency for cosmic truth. Camus reached an impasse, Wilson argued: the absurd was real enough, but surrender to it was intellectual surrender. Wilson’s “New Existentialism”, grounded in Husserl’s phenomenology, insisted consciousness is intentional: we can choose to grasp more reality. Peak experiences, those sudden floods of meaning, proved it. Camus offered dignified endurance; Wilson offered evolution.
Even if his mass-media star flashed and faded with The Outsider, Wilson never stopped. Over a hundred books later, he remains one of the most stubbornly unfashionable figures of 20th-century letters. Existentialist philosopher, true-crime chronicler, occult historian and philosophical science-fiction pioneer, he refused to accept the fashionable despair of his era. While the chattering classes wallowed in Sartre’s nausea and Camus’s absurdism, Wilson went looking for a way out.
His own outsider status wasn’t helped by a naively stupid youthful friendship with Oswald Mosley, who in the 1950s was attempting to rehabilitate his post-war reputation. But when Mosley ran as an MP for Kensington North in 1959, Wilson was appalled by the campaign. Standing in a bus queue with some Jamaicans as Mosley’s campaign van drove past, blaring Get the niggers out of England, “Abruptly, I felt intensely ashamed for my own countrymen.” Still, Wilson remained friends with Mosley. Wilson’s too-often credulity also drew him briefly into David Irving’s circle in the ’80s; but then, so was Christopher Hitchens, the lawyer who defended Irving in court.
His non-fictions on crime – Encyclopedia of Murder and A Criminal History of Mankind – aren’t prurient sensationalism. They are an extension of the same question that drove The Outsider: why do some men become monsters while others reach for the stars? Wilson saw crime not as social failure but as a perversion of the same creative impulse that produces genius. The outsider who channels his alienation into art or philosophy becomes a hero; the one who turns it inward or outward in rage becomes a killer.
Then came the occult turn. Just in time for the ’70s occult paperback boom.
In 1971’s The Occult: A History and its sequels, Wilson mapped humanity’s perennial fascination with the unseen. But he wasn’t peddling woo, he was searching, as the burgeoning field of parapsychology did, even in vain, for a scientific basis for occult phenomena.
He proposed “Faculty X”, a latent human power to “reach beyond the present”, to grasp reality more fully than the narrow beam of everyday consciousness allows. Faculty X explained everything from mystical insight to paranormal phenomena: not magic, but an evolutionary faculty waiting to be awakened. Wilson saw it as the next step in human consciousness, the very thing that lifts us above mere animals.
Here the comparison with the French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin grows fascinating.
Both men were evolutionary optimists who rejected materialist reductionism. Teilhard’s “noosphere” and Omega Point envisioned cosmic evolution marching toward divine consciousness, with Christ as the telos. Wilson, the working-class autodidact, was blunter and more secular: Faculty X wasn’t handed down from on high but a practical, testable power of the mind, already flickering in moments of intense focus, creativity or crisis. In interviews he explicitly nodded to Teilhard’s “complexification”, the drive toward higher organisation and awareness. Yet where Teilhard theologised evolution, Wilson psychologised it. Faculty X was phenomenological, rooted in peak experiences and “the reality of other times and places”. No Jesuit mysticism required, just deliberate training of the will. Wilson admired Teilhard’s vision but stripped away the altar rails.
Wilson’s fiction put flesh on the philosophy. His “philosophical science fiction”, such as The Mind Parasites, The Philosopher’s Stone and The Space Vampires (filmed as the gloriously daft Lifeforce), used Lovecraftian cosmic horror as a vehicle for his ideas. He’d once dismissed H P Lovecraft as a “bad writer” whose cosmic dread was adolescent posturing. Then he read deeper and grudgingly admired the Yankee genteel recluse’s ability to make the universe feel hostile and vast. Wilson’s own Lovecraft pastiches, especially the mind-parasite entities that feed on human vitality, turned the mythos into existential allegory: external forces (or internal weaknesses) that keep us trapped in triviality. His Spider World series, in which humankind has been enslaved and driven to outlawry by giant spiders in the far future, took the same impulse into epic fantasy.
By the end, Wilson had written more than a hundred books, outlived the Angry Young Men label and watched the literary world move on to smaller, meaner concerns. Academia mostly ignored him as too popular, too optimistic and too unclassifiable. Yet his “New Existentialism” remains a quiet rebuke to the nihilism that still dominates cultural conversation. Where Sartre and Camus offered elegant descriptions of despair, Wilson offered a ladder out of the pit. Faculty X wasn’t a theory, it was a call to arms for the human mind. Against Teilhard’s cosmic Christology, he set a more modest, democratic faith in latent human powers. Against Camus’s noble absurdity he insisted the rock need not roll forever.
Wilson died, aged 82, on 5 December 2013.
Evaluating his career in Colin Wilson: the Man and his Mind, Howard F Dossor wrote that, “it seems most likely that critics analysing his work in the middle of the 21st century will be puzzled that his contemporaries paid such inadequate attention to him”. Conversely, science writer Martin Gardner, saw Wilson as an intelligent writer who was duped by paranormal claims, particularly by the likes of Uri Geller, who “decayed into an occult eccentric”. All true enough, but it was an eccentricity that is just fun. As Philip Pullman wrote, “Wilson was always far better and more interesting than fashionable opinion claimed.”
In an age of curated victimhood and algorithmic despair, Wilson’s unfashionable insistence that humans are capable of more than endless complaint feels almost revolutionary. He was never quite an insider and never quite an outsider. He was simply a man who looked at the evidence – of genius, of horror and of the unseen – and refused to lower his gaze. He was also a standing warning against opening your mind so much that your brain falls out.
In the end, though, his most lasting legacy may be as a working-class philosopher who reminded us that the real adventure of consciousness is only just beginning.
