Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson

by Gary Lachman

Historian Gary Lachman delivers a fascinating, rollicking biography of literary and cultural rebel Colin Wilson, one of the most adventurous, hopeful, and least understood intellects of the past century.

You will embark on the intellectual ride of a lifetime in this rediscovery of the life and work of writer, rebel, and social experimenter Colin Wilson (1931-2013).

Author of the classic The Outsider , Wilson, across his 118 books, purveyed a philosophy of mind power and human potential that made him one of the least understood and most important voices of the twentieth century. Wilson helped usher in the cultural revolution of the 1960s with his landmark work, The Outsider , published in 1956. The Outsider was an intelligent, meticulous, and unprecedented study of nonconformity in all facets of life. Wilson, finally, became a prolific and unparalleled historian of the occult, providing a generation of readers with a responsible and scholarly entry point to a world of mysteries.

Now, acclaimed historian Gary Lachman, a friend of Wilson and a scholar of his work, provides an extraordinary and delightful biography that delves into the life, thought, and evolution of one of the greatest intellectual rebels and underrated visionaries of the twentieth century.

Genres: Biography, Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Biography Memoir, History

416 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2016

About the author

Gary Lachman is an American writer and musician. Lachman is best known to readers of mysticism and the occult from the numerous articles and books he has published.

Reviews

[David Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Gary Lachman’s new biography Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson (2016), readers are treated to a sort of bildungsroman – the story of an individual’s spiritual and intellectual development – of the philosopher Colin Wilson. An English, Leicester-born and working-class ‘home grown existentialist’, whose jolting rise to fame with his 1956 The Outsider suffered an unfortunate and undeserved backlash with his second book Religion and the Rebel (1957). For the next 50 years, up until his death in 2013, Wilson produced a genre-spanning amount of work, but received the curious silence of the literary establishment (he has been described as the bête noire of the Oxbridge establishment). Nevertheless his vision has remained for many a respected, pivotal and increasingly relevant turning point in Western thought. His incredible contribution to philosophy was a part of a larger philosophical ‘New Existentialism’, which aimed to nothing less than to tackle the pessimistic biases in literature, philosophy, culture and science.

Indeed in his most famous work, The Outsider, he dealt with the sudden sense of affirmation felt by the Romantics, indeed a somewhat a precarious sense of affirmation which often collapsed back a feeling of despondency or ‘life failure’. Nevertheless Wilson felt these men were at the critical point of an evolutionary leap, and if one could just discipline oneself in such a way, these visions of affirmation could indeed be made permanent, and thus become more firmly rooted in the objectivity from which they blossomed.

Wilson also went on to produce an enormous amount of subsequent works which all began from the same premise: an attempt to go beyond the problem of common existential complaints (ennui, despair, thoughts of suicide) to establish a firm set of values from which the evolutionary man could strive and thrive.

“The vision of absurdity is one of the poles of existence. Its correlate is the pole of reason and the will to live. So long as a man maintains his hold on these two poles he completes the circuit, so to speak, and the vital force of life flows through him. If he releases his hold he becomes nothing, or – which is much the same thing – the hero of a best-seller”.

These words, said by fellow Angry Young Man and working-class writer Stuart Holroyd, encapsulates Colin Wilson’s developmental dynamo of “Eternal Yes versus Eternal No”. A sort of alchemical friction between optimism and pessimism, affirmation and negation. But he was, as Brad Spurgeon’s book on Wilson is titled, overall a “philosopher of optimism”.

*

Lachman charts the inspiring consistency and perseverance of Wilson’s life and works, showing just how self-discipline and an optimistic frame of mind can overcome the challenges of a dispirited modern culture.

Indeed, Lachman succinctly describes the essential ‘wonder of life’ and ‘will to live’ in Wilson’s work, for when “our wonder is strong and our curiosity wide, our vitality increases, and we are able to grip our own existence more powerfully”. And as Wilson produced over a hundred books on subjects ranging from philosophy to the occult, criminology, sexology and psychology, Atlantis and UFOs, even booze and a polemic against gardening, we can safely say that wonder was at large in Wilson’s life, with his enormous appetite for both knowledge but more importantly insight.

Beyond the Robot details precisely this voracious appetite for meaning, of a curiosity that was positively driven towards “eating significance”, as Wilson put it. Lachman, having taken on Colin Wilson’s enormous oeuvre has attempted to summarise and synthesise the essence of his work, to bring it into the context not only of his life and times, but into the wider reaches of philosophy, everyday existence to the further reaches of cosmology. And in doing so he untangles the misunderstandings of Wilson’s work, and shoots straight through the inertia of academia and much of the literary establishment which rejects Wilson’s work with unthinking reflex. Lachman instead not only celebrates his work, but brings to the surface Colin Wilson’s important contribution as a philosopher in his own right, and also as a human being in search of the farther shores of human nature. Wilson’s intensely driven and incredibly honest intelligence is warmly reflected by Lachman, who was a close friend and who had a great insight into his work routines and an appreciation for his ideas.

For anybody who has been following Gary Lachman’s work will be aware that he is the right man for the job. Both share the same sort of existential urgency, the insatiable curiosity into the nature and mystery of human consciousness. His most ‘Wilsonian’ book – and like The Outsider an incredible synthesis and unique philosophical treatise in its own right – is The Caretakers of the Cosmos (2013). Indeed the book was poignantly dedicated to Wilson, who Lachman credits as having “certainly repaired quite a bit of the universe”. It is therefore no surprise that the degree of sensitivity to his subject is complimented with illuminating notes and an enormous amount of reading (a result of his nearly 40 years of reading Wilson’s works). This results in what is no doubt the most comprehensive book on Wilson since Howard Dossor’s Colin Wilson: The Man & His Mind (1990).

And if you are like me an obsessive Colin Wilson reader there is much to be gained by reading Beyond the Robot, for Lachman carefully balances the biographical elements alongside the ideas, and what occurs is a very organic sense of development of an individual. Due to this very reason it is a veritable goldmine for anyone new or interested in Wilson’s work, for it is as much a journey through Wilson’s ideas as it is an evocative biography of a man concerned with mankind’s deepest and most important questions: What is the meaning of human existence? How can we control our consciousness and reach our full potential? Is meaning objective, and if so, what are the steps to know this fact all the time?

By reading Beyond the Robot one comes away enormously intellectually enriched, for all of Wilson’s many essential insights are bought together into a huge synthesis, whereby one revelation seamlessly relates to another and so on. At the end we can step back and take Wilson’s whole work as an optimistic existential edifice. Lachman succeeds wonderfully at this, and I believe this is precisely the book that was needed to bring Wilson’s work together; to give it a necessary overall context which doesn’t scare people off. The careful development of Wilson’s ideas is detailed chronologically in each chapter, enabling us see that these ideas and insights were not sudden jumps or illogical leaps, but altogether an implicit part of existential obsession that ran through all of Wilson’s work.

Certainly, Wilson’s life and ideas were not at all divorced, or thought up in some abstract or detached sort of way, but they emerged through an obsessive phenomenological analysis of his moods, his observations, and experiences in general living. By identifying the evolutionary dynamo of highs and lows, Lachman accurately recounts Colin Wilson’s life as it was: a search for higher states of consciousness, ways out of habit and neurosis, an understanding of our ‘sexual illusions’ and even the mysteries of Atlantis and other possible dimensions; even UFOs and their role in the vast mysterious tapestry of space and time.

Again Lachman makes sure that it isn’t merely a selection of exotic eccentricities and Fortean fragments, a common problem with any writer on the paranormal and esoteric. And although it is a biography about Colin Wilson the man, it is also about an essential approach to living. Lachman shows us, through Wilson’s own adventures and refreshing insights into the human condition, that the world as we know it is often blinkered, narrowed down to the ‘here and now’. And within rare moments we suddenly expand, and our conception of ourselves and the universe we live in inflates too. There are ‘horizons of distant fact’, as William James called it, and these ‘distant facts’ are collated by Wilson, and pieced together in an attempt to “stimulate the earth-bound imagination of man to grasp the immensity around him”. There is more to life. We know this, but how can we know this fact more deeply? Beyond the Robot is about such a man driven by precisely this question his whole life.

Indeed the questions Wilson posed to existence were often answered by the sheer joy of the search itself, stimulating as it did ever larger vistas of thought. Freedom, he ceaselessly reminds us, can come to the individual who can think outside of ordinary constraints, who can suddenly breathe the air of larger realities beyond the personality and life’s trivialities.

Wilson, in the end, was such a man we can all relate to on some level. And most significantly we should aspire, like Wilson himself, to those higher levels to which he aimed to make available to us all. For he left us with his last book Superconsciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience (2009), in which he bookended his own contribution to linear time. But Gary Lachman’s book may reignite veteran Wilson readers to revisit his work, and introduce and inspire future readers to take up the life-affirming and enhancing philosophy he single-handedly helped to create: the ‘New Existentialism’.

Certainly Lachman and the publisher TarcherPerigee have done the world of philosophy and esotericism (and fellow new existentialists) a tremendous service by producing this incredible resource in such a timeless edition. A source of inspiration to new readers and veteran Wilson-readers alike for years to come. It will be recognised as the definitive introduction and scholarly overview of Wilson’s impressive contribution to the canon Western thought.

[Steve Greenleaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

n my reflections about Colin Wilson written at the time I learned of his death in 2013, I remarked on the extent of Wilson’s publications and how I wished that someone would make a compendium of his work, sorting out what I referred to as “the junk” it included. (A description that I now regret.) When I reviewed Gary Lachman’s The Secret History of Consciousness, I described how both Lachman and I had encountered and appreciated the works of Colin Wilson, and I how believed the Lachman would inherit the mantle of leadership from his friend Colin Wilson in the field of exploration of human consciousness. Now, with the publication of Lachman’s biography of Wilson, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson (2016), my conjectures and wishes are in large measure fulfilled. While Lachman has not edited a compendium of Wilson’s writings (other have done this), he’s used his formidable powers to survey Wilson’s life and work, thereby making Wilson’s life-long project accessible in one volume. It is a task that Lachman is supremely qualified to perform, and one that he succeeds in wonderfully.

For those unfamiliar with Colin Wilson, in 1956 this young Brit from a working class family burst onto the British literary scene with his book, The Outsiders. Without benefit of a college education (or as he might put it, with the benefit of no college education), Wilson wrote and published a work that discussed famous individuals, such as T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, Nijinsky, and others, who did not fit into society. The book became a sensation and brought Wilson into association (involuntarily) with a collection of young British writers dubbed “The Angry Young Men.” But by having flown too high too soon—and perhaps also based on British class snobbery—Wilson fell just as quickly from favor. Ove the course of his career, Wilson would suffer a roller coaster ride of acclaim and derision (although outside of Britain, particularly in the Middle East and Japan, he gained wide, continued popularity). But while castigations in the public eye were discouraging, Wilson was a man on a mission, a mission that continued to keep him working until a stroke finally deprived him of his ability to write until a couple of years before his death at age 82.

What Wilson wrote about seemed to be “everything,” at least to the casual observer. But, as Lachman demonstrates, a thread of concerns and interests runs throughout Wilson’s writings. That interest centers around human consciousness and how we can make our consciousness work for our benefit and not to our detriment. As someone who has read 11 of his books (as best as I can recollect), I knew about this thread, but since he’d published over 100 books (yes, you read that correctly), I thought that the others went off on a different track. I was interested in philosophy and psychology, while Wilson also wrote literary criticism, biographies, about crime (especially murder), unusual sexual practices, the occult and paranormal, and lost civilizations. Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and so on; I’m all in. But poltergeists, Atlantis, and grisly murders? No thanks. But here is where Lachman’s work proved especially worthwhile for me. For while Wilson, who loved to spend his money on books, classical recordings, and wine (not a bad way to blow through money), was forced to write to keep ahead of this banker, he nevertheless always chose subjects that centered on important issues of human consciousness and intentions. His works would always find a way to explore further the mind involved in human conduct and thinking. Wilson was first and foremost a thinker, a man of ideas, and that was always the impetus behind his investigations.

I had a copy of The Occult, Wilson’s first foray into the paranormal, that remained unread on my bookshelf until it was dispatched in the great pruning before left to live abroad. On such topics, along with those concerning extraterrestrials and lost civilizations, I considered myself an open-minded skeptic. But perhaps the aptest description of my attitude was that of a prototypical American as described by William James: I just couldn’t see the cash value of such topics. Wilson, even with his extensive investigations into these topics—and his eventual acceptance of the reality of some of the phenomena—saw the limits of its usefulness. As Lachman explains:

[Wilson] was not entirely skeptical, but he felt that people get interested in the occult for the wrong reasons, a sadly true reflection. He had spoken with many spiritualists and while he believed in their sincerity, it was the triviality of their interest in life after death, as well as the kind of life that was supposed to be, that repelled him. Compared to the concerns of philosophy or science it was, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “all too human,” too personal and small. A look at most spiritualist literature can, I think, confirm this. Wilson knew that “our life can offer a reality and an intensity” in this world now, compared to which most religious or supernatural solutions to its mysteries seem irrelevant.23 It was this belief that had led to his new existentialism. Saying that the answer to the mystery of existence is that we in some way survive bodily death seemed to miss the point.

Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, loc. 4145

And as Lachman writes of himself:

My own feeling is that, taken in isolation, some of the claims made about advanced prehistoric civilizations may not be convincing—some are outright unbelievable—but as with the paranormal, when added up they do seem persuasive and I see nothing wrong in accepting the strong possibility that something along these lines is the case.

Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, loc. 8201

After reading these and other comments, I was encouraged that Lachman and Wilson both hold a healthy degree of skepticism about such topics, along with an appreciation of the limited usefulness of such knowledge. I hold a better opinion of Wilson’s efforts along these and many other diverse lines of inquiry. As Lachman notes, Wilson was much more like a journalist than a scientific investigator when writing about unusual phenomena. He was not a scholar or a scientist, but an original thinker who was very effective at researching via books and interviews, but not in culling results up to scholarly or legal standards. The mind and its workings are what interested Wilson.

Indeed, Wilson’s work as a philosophic and psychological thinker remains of the greatest value. Someone who’s lived a modicum of life and who has an inquiring mind fertilized—usually by reading—by other thoughtful minds and who can write (as Wilson did fluently) can think philosophically and psychologically. But sound scholarship and scientific investigations require more specialized and rigorous training that Wilson did not have. Thus, readers have to sort through a lot of information that may not be reliable—and topics such as the paranormal or ancient civilizations reveal only disconnected bits of evidence—therefore making speculations—mostly ungrounded—run rampant. Wilson seemed to have known this and appreciated the limitation, but accounts about these topics allowed him to speculate, which is what he did well.

Lachman has deftly melded Wilson’ life into his thought, which is fitting for a man so intoxicated with attempting to resolve life’s greatest challenges. Wilson’s most significant work was done on the page, so the events of his life, especially after he published his first book, become secondary to his thoughts. Also, Wilson provided accounts of his life in several of this books, so that the tale of his early years was a familiar one and comparatively easy for a biographer. Lachman also has the advantage of having morphed from an admirer to a friend to a fellow writer. Lachman obviously admired, liked, and learned from his subject, a trajectory that no doubt helped sustain him through the challenge of writing this book. Even Lachman, now an experienced and capable writer, obviously had to toil long and mightily to publish such a thorough study of such a prolific and wide-ranging author.

There are two compliments that I can make about this book provide some measure of its success in telling the story of Colin Wilson. First, if someone told me that they wanted to know about Colin Wilson and his thought, and asked: “What book should I read first?” I might suggest instead that she read Lachman’s biography first, and then she could jump into whichever of Wilson’s works that most seemed to capture her fancy. Lachman pretty much has it all covered.

My second compliment comes by way of a conundrum. What should I read next, a book by Colin Wilson or one by Gary Lachman? A delightful conundrum to contemplate!

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't remember exactly when I discovered Colin Wilson or which one of his works I read first. It could have been "The Misfits" or "The Books in my Life." It certainly wasn't his most famous work, "The Outsiders."

Regardless of the details, I just remember being blown away by the depth and extent of Mr. Wilson's knowledge, and even more bowled over by the fact that he was such an irrepressibly positive human being. It wasn't just a matter of his disposition, either. The joy that suffused his work (and which is fortunately contagious to the reader) was very much tied to Wilson's intellectual discoveries and theories (including his idea of "Faculty X"). Colin Wilson was the first modern thinker I encountered who refused to succumb to nihilism or ennui that was (understandably) so rife in the post-War continental discourse.

Gary Lachman had his work cut out for him with this work, considering that Wilson literally wrote something like one-hundred books on a diverse range of subjects, from the occult, to human sexuality, to the potential existence of extraterrestrials. The biographer does a capable enough job of giving us a portrait of Mr. Wilson's life, his books, and his thought. Lachman apparently knew Wilson personally, and while the book isn't liberally peppered with personal anecdotes, it remains a satisfying biography of an unwieldy subject. There have been previous attempts to summarize Wilson and his work, but none this thorough. Recommended.

[Allyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to this because I remember reading Wilson's The Outsider when I was a teenager. Even then the mystical aspects of Wilson's existentialism were not of great appeal. This book delineates his theories and ideas quite lucidly, but they remain a form of theory that in some manner repulses. What interested more is how fanatical Wilson was about his theory and how many people he consider to be categorically wrong where he was right. This makes him come across as rather narrow and blinkered, which was perhaps not the case. It has not encouraged me to go back to Wilson's work or to read his autobiography.

[Bill Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, highly-readable overview of Colin Wilson's "life and work". His theories about consciousness are overdue for fresh examination; this is a great start.

[Simon Kidd]

I've only read one of Wilson's books (G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep), and that was many years ago. Having learnt more about Wilson since then, I'm not motivated to familiarize myself with his other publications. Substantial criticisms of Wilson have been made by others with far stronger claims to competence in this area. A good summary has been published in a recent blog post by independent writer, Kevin R. D. Shepherd, who has been writing critically about Wilson, and related figures, since the late 1970s. See Colin Wilson (posted January 2018).

Shepherd refers to Lachman in the last few paragraphs:

'Wilson has been elevated by his followers, who customarily excise much of the criticism, which they depreciate as irrelevant. Gary Lachman approvingly quotes from the early Wilson autobiography Voyage to a Beginning: "If this body and brain of mine could be driven on for another hundred years or so, I could probably solve all the problems of philosophy single-handed" (Lachman 2016:349).

'The American publicity for Lachman's recent biography has asserted that Wilson "became a prolific and unparalleled historian of the occult, providing a generation of readers with a responsible and scholarly entry point to a world of mysteries." This commercial convenience is assisted by suppression of critics. Wilson was not a scholar, but a prolific writer prone to flaws and errors. The current publicity is excusing the flaws and overlooking errors.'

[Mike Luoma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another enlightening read from Gary Lachman. I was curious about Wilson from references to him in Lachman's earlier Secret Teachers of the Western World, and wondered why he merited a biography from Lachman, who bios of Jung, Crowley, and Steiner, as well as other works on other esoterica, I've enjoyed. It has been an immensely enjoyable experience to discover the work, the thought, and writing of Colin Wilson. I suppose the best thing you can say about a biography is that it brings its subject to life, and Lachman most certainly does this with Wilson. By the book's end, we feel the sense of loss and grief Lachman and Wilson's other friends and fans felt upon losing him. The book made me wish I could have known about Wilson when he was alive, gone to see him speak, or better yet have dinner, wine and conversation as Lachman describes. Lachman deftly creates a sense of unrequited longing in the reader to experience the easy generosity of Wilson. Not only was he generous with his ideas, but it's refreshing to read of how he'd give advances to other writers, collaborators of his that he felt were worse off than he was - even as he was running overdrafts at his bank. The sharing of small, personal anecdotes and large, mind-blowing concepts of consciousness makes for quite a stew, a heady brew to take in all at once. Believe this book bears a re-read down the road - after I've read a bunch of Colin Wilson's work...

[Dick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Colin Wilson had some interesting ideas. Lachman presents them well. Theres a lot of name dropping of famous people, many of whom I'm unfamiliar. The stuff about the paranormal was a bit hard to accept. I'm definitely trying to raise my level of consciousness. Hmmm, wonder if I should read a Colin Wilson book?

It strikes me that Christianity is a path to higher consciousness. I suspect other religions would claim the same. For reasons I don't understand, Wilson favored the "wierd" occult over any religious tradition. Odd that he'd investigate some bizarre paranormal reports but not the various appearances on the Virgin Mary or other miracles. I was surprised that he said the world would be a better place had St. Paul never lived.

[Christian Carbone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taking classes can really get in the way of one’s recreational reading, although this book would have taken quite a while regardless. A fascinating portrait of a visionary thinker and writer, Mr. Wilson was quite literally living in a tent when his first book, “The Outsider”, came out in 1965. Although nothing he wrote after would have his debuts’ level of success, this did not deter his ambition and vast writing output. His career-long yearning to discover the ability to garner “super-consciousness” without the help of chemicals or adrenaline is a most interesting context of his career and this volume. Entertaining, thought-provoking and very well written. Kudos to Mr Lachman and Mr. Wilson.🤗.

[Frederick Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book. I bought it after seeing it on a second-hand book shelf at the Booksburgh in Plattsburgh NY.

What was interesting to me in this biography was the struggle Colin Wilson had to make a living, which was one of the reasons why he wrote so many books. Almost every creative person struggles with this issue and it brought out Colin's humanity.

I read a lot of his books when I was younger and will read his "Super Consciousness" book. I plan on reading more books written by Gary Lachman as well.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book and the whole idea of bring existential thinking to a POSITIVE! place - Wow, who would of thought that? As soon as I was done with it - I wanted to re-read it again. Never had that kind of feeling about a book. Yes!

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colin Wilson has always held a place in my heart as an avid reader. This wonderful book on his life both as an outsider and as a literary luminary is excellent. Gary Lachman has become one of my new favorite non-fiction authors.

[Mary Benton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very clear and intelligent account of the work of Colin Wilson.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

COLIN WILSON Is one of my favorite writers I enjoyed this biography a great deal

[John Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lachman really outdid himself here. This was an enlightening and enjoyable read.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic introduction to the work of Wilson, one, I'm sure, that will help to introduce his work to many more future fans. As a fairly new reader of Colin Wilson's work myself (a year or two), this was a really concise overview of the 100+ books and ideas covered within. I'm very much looking forward to reading them all!

[Ard · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the nineties I had read another biography of Wilson by Howard Dossor, and even though Lachmans's book was published over 25 years later, I didn't expect to find a whole lot of new stuff. By now I've read most of Wilson's impressive oeuvre and I was mostly curious about his last years before he died in 2013. I have to admit that before reading I was a bit suspicious about Lachman. I noticed he had published books in the same vein as Colin Wilson and even did a few biographies about the same people Wilson had. And then he wrote one about Wilson too. Hmm.

But this book is great. First of all Lachman did a fine job analyzing the wide variety of subjects Wilson wrote about, most of which came together at some point in Wilson's writing. Lachman chose the chronological route of telling the story, whereas Dossor had divided Wilson's life and ideas in subjects as life story, philosophy, psychology, crime and literature. Lachman's way worked better, but only because he was able to keep a firm grasp on Wilson's basic ideas as he developed them over the years and how they came together. As a result, the book reads like an intellectual adventure.

But apart from that the writing is very good as well. Wilson himself had a fluent and attractive writing style that often made me feel like he was this somewhat excentric, well-read uncle that was telling me all kinds of fascinating stories when he visited. And even though Lachman doesn't really get there, he sure comes close. This was a joy to read, an intelligent, perceptive and highly readable biography. Wilson's ideas deserve to be studied and this book is an excellent textbook.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beyond the Robot was a profoundly disappointing read.

By the end of this overly long book, the reader comes away not understanding Colin Wilson any better than when they began.

There are a series of occlusions left unanswered because Lachman considers Wilson to be a mentor and a friend. As a result, what should have been a biographically rich life is left little more than a series of dissatisfying blurbs...this happened; then this; then this, with no depth or psychological insight.

Most of the book is taken up with explaining Wilson's ideas, but, for the most part, what the reader has here is a populizer (Lachman) writing a popular biography of a populizer (Wilson)...Wilson's ideas are too simplistic and unperceptive to need this kind of treatment...but his turgid, troubled life should have made great reading...but not in the hands of Lachman...who wishes to protect his friend's dignity at any cost.

What's the cost? A biography not worth any reader's time.

Rating: 2 out of 5 Stars

Not recommended for anyone...

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was quite something. It must have taken Mr Lachman a long time to assimilate the research on this.
It works well as a summary of the works of Wilson, the overlooked polymath of his time. I was quite moved in parts.

[Ralphe Wiggins · Rating 2 out of 5]

dropped because the writing seemed unfocused

[Paul McCain · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally had Wilson's Occult books on my influential books list, but decided to add this one. I read a sample of this book, and having read Gary Lachman's book on Crowley, decided this would be a great introduction to and overview of Wilson's optimistic existentialism and bold ideas.