Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites

Colin Wilson’s novel The Mind Parasites appeared in 1967. Wilson is one of the most intriguing, baffling, controversial figures in 20th century literature, and one of the strangest. You cannot review a Colin Wilson novel without saying something about his ideas and his philosophy because his novels are extended meditations on those ideas and philosophies but it is difficult to explain Wilson’s thought without writing an entire book on it. So I apologise in advance if my brief attempt proves to be pitifully inadequate.

Wilson gained overnight fame at the age of 24 with his non-fiction book The Outsider. Wilson used the term outsider in a particular sense, to describe literary figures who were not so much social outsiders as intellectual outsiders. Wilson certainly saw himself in that light. Wilson was an existentialist but I would describe him as a Wilsonian existentialist. Even among intellectual outsiders Wilson was an outsider.

Wilson developed an increasing interest in the occult and the paranormal, but again he did so in a characteristically Wilsonian way. While others disagreed he also always maintained that his approach to these subjects was scientific.

In the early 60s he discovered Lovecraft. This discovery blew his mind, as they used to say in the 60s. He always had certain reservations about Lovecraft but he recognised him as an incredibly important writer and one of the key literary figures of modern times. The Mind Parasites was Wilson’s response to this discovery. That is not to imply that this is a Lovecraft pastiche. Wilson was not the kind of writer to produce a mere pastiche. There are lots of other things going on in The Mind Parasites, lots of other intellectual interests and speculations coming together, but Lovecraft was the initial catalyst. And you will find major elements here borrowed from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

The Mind Parasites is ostensibly written in the fairly distant future, apparently the early 22nd century, but it concerns events of the 1990s. So already we’re dealing with some games involving the past, the present and the future.

The narrator, Dr Gilbert Austin, is an archaeologist. He is puzzled by some excavations, and by some figures. In the future world of this novel it is possible to date archaeological finds with extreme precision. There is absolutely no doubt about the dating of these finds. There is no possibility of error. And yet the dates are impossible. Not just impossible by a few centuries, but impossible by many thousands of years. Dr Austin has to consider the possibility that everything we thought we knew about the past is wrong.

And then there are those inscriptions. They’re not just vaguely Lovecraftian. They are drawn directly from Lovecraft’s works, and yet they are thousands of years old. Could it be that Lovecraft thought he was writing fiction but was in fact writing historical fact?

And then the mind parasites strike. And the novel becomes much much weirder. The mind parasites are inside people’s minds, but they are not products of the human mind. They come from somewhere else. Dr Austin’s archaeological finds have cast doubt on our understanding of the distant past. The discovery of the mind parasites casts doubts on our understanding of the recent past, and the present, and the nature of reality and consciousness. The mind parasites are also a very real and terrifying threat.

This book just keeps getting weirder. I haven’t mentioned the wild stuff about the Moon yet.

The key to this book is not the Lovecraftian stuff but Wilson’s interest in the workings of the mind. His ideas naturally are heavily slanted towards the paranormal and fringe science but with a good helping of psychoanalysis and some esoteric notions about the unconscious. He sees the unconscious mind as an entire universe, and the exploration of that universe as being far more interesting than the exploration of outer space or any kind of conventional mainstream science.

Wilson would take a fringe idea and push it as far as any reasonable person would dare, and then push it a whole lot further. For Wilson there were no limits.

There’s plenty of action, there are epic battles, but all taking place inside people’s minds.

The Mind Parasites is simply unlike any other science fiction novel but it is fascinating and it is highly recommended for its extreme weirdness.

Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth

Re-reading At the Mountains of Madness recently has inspired me to revisit some other H. P. Lovecraft stories, in particular his novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth (written in 1931 and published in 1936).

The Shadow Over Innsmouth includes virtually all of the elements most characteristic of Lovecraft’s fiction. It deals with cultural decay, racial degeneration, madness, forbidden knowledge, malevolent cults and inherited evil.

An impoverished student is making a tour through New England. Finding that travel by rail will soon exhaust his meagre financial resources he rather unwisely allows himself to be persuaded to make the journey to Arkham by means of a bus service stopping at Innsmouth. The bus service is run by a native of Innsmouth. The inhabitants of Innsmouth are shunned by the citizens of other nearby towns. They are evasive as to the reasons they hold the denizens of Innsmouth in such abhorrence although it appears to have something to do with a catastrophic plague that decimated the population of the town in the 1840s, and to be due to an greater extent by the vaguely disturbing oddness of the natives of that town.

The student is rather fascinated by all this and decides to break his journey and spend a day in Innsmouth. He has a keen interest in architecture and is something of an amateur antiquarian and Innsmouth has much to interest such a man. He finds the locals to be secretive to an extraordinary degree but he finds a very old man who can be persuaded, by being plied with large quantities of whiskey, to tell him the town’s history. 

A certain Captain Obed Marsh, during his trading trips to the South Seas, had encountered  a native tribe who had struck a bargain with mysterious creatures from beneath the sea. The natives were rewarded by fabulously rich hauls of fish and gold artifacts, but at the price of making human sacrifices to these strange fish-like amphibian creatures. An even greater reward was on offer - immortality. The price for this was an agreement to interbreed with the sea-creatures. Captain Marsh had learnt that these sea-creatures could be summoned in many places and rather rashly summons them to Innsmouth. The strange and vaguely repellant appearance of the inhabitants of Innsmouth is the result of interbreeding with these amphibian creatures. The student soon discovers that the horrors of Innsmouth are not confined to the distant past - they are very much alive in the present day. Like many another Lovecraft protagonist he finds that the search for knowledge about things best left undiscovered leaves him tottering on the brink of insanity. This borderline insanity has other far more personal and horrifying causes however.

Lovecraft’s stylistic quirks and love for purple prose are on full display here. While conventionally minded critics have seen these things as weaknesses they are in fact part of a carefully considered and very deliberate technique. Lovecraft wants to create an atmosphere of near-hysteria. A less overheated and overwrought prose style would not have served his purposes.

In this novella Lovecraft also uses his favourite technique of having the narrator reveal the full extent of the horrors he has witnessed in a gradual manner, throwing out plenty of hints but being reluctant to give the full facts until he is forced to do so. The reader, especially one familiar with Lovecraft’s work, will connect the dots long before the narrator does so (and will be quite unsurprised when Cthulhu puts in an appearance). This again is a deliberate strategy on Lovecraft’s part. His narrators simply do not want to connect all the dots, partly from a fear for their own sanity, partly through a fear of being thought insane, and perhaps most of all from a reluctance to admit to themselves the full and horrific ramifications of what they have witnessed. They want to imagine that perhaps they are mistaken, that perhaps there might be a rational explanation, even when they know that there can be no rational explanation.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth has been regarded as expressing Lovecraft’s horror of miscegenation. In fact the overriding theme in Lovecraft’s fiction is the danger of civilisation collapse and racial degeneration. These were widely accepted at the time as very real threats. The descent of once great and powerful civilisations such as China and the Ottoman Empire into chaos, corruption and eventual collapse had demonstrated that civilisations could indeed collapse. The fear of racial degeneration was shared by a large number of contemporary thinkers including many who were firmly in the “enlightened” and “progressive” camps. Many contemporary socialists such as H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Bernard Shaw saw eugenics as essential for the survival of civilisation. Lovecraft’s views on these subjects were absolutely mainstream at the time.

The novella also illustrates the extent to which Lovecraft saw the sea as a source of horror, harbouring a variety of malevolent entities and races. The combination of the sea and remote communities provides the quintessence of Lovecraftian horror.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a major work in the Lovecraft canon and a wonderfully effective example of his horror technique. Highly recommended.

H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness was one of H. P. Lovecraft’s few long stories. Some regard it as a novella while others consider it a short novel. Structurally it’s probably best considered a longish novella. Either way it’s the most ambitious entry in his Cthulhu Mythos cycle.

It was written in 1931 but rejected by Weird Tales as being too long. It was finally published in three parts in Astounding Stories in 1936.

The Antarctic setting is evidence of the influence of Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written nearly a century earlier. Poe’s 1838 novel is mentioned several times and At the Mountains of Madness is thus an attempt to link Lovecraft’s own Cthulhu Mythos to Poe’s work. The Antarctic setting also appealed to Lovecraft because of his own horror of the cold.

Lovecraft’s novella tells the story of the extraordinary and horrifying discoveries made by a Miskatonic University expedition in the late 1920s. The narrator, geologist William Dyer (one of the leaders of the expedition), has decided to reveal the full extent of the discoveries in order to argue that  the proposed Starkweather-Moore Expedition must not take place. There are some places that should not be explored and some secrets that should remain forever secret.

The structure of the book is interesting. The narrator first tells us what might be termed the official version of the ill-fated expedition, the survivors having considered that this version contained as much information as you could safely be made public at the time. The narrator then tells us the real story. He is reluctant to do so but believes this is the only way to prevent the Starkweather-Moore Expedition from setting out.

The expedition had been lavishly funded, to the extent of having two ships and four large Dornier aircraft at its disposal. One of the four leaders of the expedition, the biologist Lake,  had set off on a side expedition with several of the aircraft. Lake had sent a series of radio messages announcing discoveries that would revolutionise our understanding of cosmology, evolution and human history. Lake’s messages became more and more excited and then suddenly ceased. Fearing disaster Dyer had set off with several companions in one of the remaining aircraft. Upon reaching Lake’s camp they found grisly evidences of disaster, and other evidence that confirmed Lake’s extraordinary discoveries. The decision was made to attribute the calamity to madness induced by a storm of unbelievable intensity. 

This is essentially the official version that was released to the public at the time. What had not been publicly revealed was that before returning to their base camp Dyer and graduate student Danforth had set off in a specially lightened Dornier to cross the gigantic mountain chain that Lake had discovered, a mountain chain that dwarfed the Himalayas. Hints dropped by Lake and certain strange and inexplicably regular features of these mountains made such a crossing seem essential.

After crossing the mountain range Dyer and Danforth discovered the remains of a vast city. Explorations of the ruins revealed a series of relief carvings that told the history of the builders of that city. That history was enough to drive Danforth permanently mad and to persuade Dyer that Antarctic exploration must never again be attempted.

It is the history of those who built the city, the Old Ones, that forms the core of the book. In this history Lovecraft develops the myth of the Old Ones in great detail and touches on the origins of Cthulhu and of other fabulous and terrifying entities such as the Shoggoth and the Mi-Go. It also explains much that had hitherto been incomprehensible in the Necronomicon and in various obscure cults, folklores and other esoteric writings. It is Lovecraft’s fullest and most ambitious treatment of the mythology he had created.

The book’s structure is rather daring. With so much space devoted to the explication of the story of the Old Ones there was a real danger that the book, being somewhat lacking in action, would be excessively slowly paced. Lovecraft avoids the danger in two ways. Firstly, his account of the Old Ones is such an imaginative tour-de-force that the reader is unlikely to be wearied by it. Secondly, he uses his favoured technique of revealing the true dimension of his horrors as slowly as possible by throwing out hints whilst concealing their full implications. At first we find Dyer’s attitude puzzling. The expedition’s discoveries are disturbing and provocative but we feel that any scientist worth his salt would be clamouring  to have them more fully investigated. Dyer does have a very good for his attitude but Lovecraft builds the tension by keeping us in the dark for as long as possible as to what it really was that sent poor Danfoth mad.

Lovecraft gives his tale added verisimilitude by adding references to real Antarctic explorers, including Australia’s Sir Douglas Mawson who really was, as stated in Lovecraft’s novel,  leading an important expedition at the same time as the fictional Miskatonic University expedition. Lovecraft had obviously done his homework on Antarctic exploration.

This book is also in some respects a lost world tale. Lovecraft was well-read in fantastic fiction and there is a certain H. Rider Haggard influence at work here, Haggard being the acknowledged master of the lost world tale.

At the Mountains of Madness is an essential part of the Cthulhu Mythos and it’s a masterful tale of imagination and terror. Very highly recommended.