The Philosopher’s Stone by Colin Wilson. Wingbow Press, 1969. 268 pages. ISBN 0-914728-28-8.
Colin Wilson was a weird character. Prolific and obviously intelligent, he wrote one well-respected work of literary criticism and also wrote less influential works in other fields before he mostly turned to parapsychology and became a crank. At one point, he made disparaging comments about the work of H. P. Lovecraft, which brought him to the attention of Lovecraft’s biggest fanboy, August Derleth.
Derleth is not well-liked by Lovecraft’s admirers, ironically, because he is largely responsible for creating what we now call the “Cthulhu mythos.” Lovecraft, though he borrowed from himself frequently, never envisioned a unified, overarching “mythos” for his work (though he came close in At the Mountains of Madness). It was Derleth who went back over Lovecraft’s work and tried to harmonize it, though he in the process rejected Lovecraft’s misanthropy and Nietzscheanism and replaced them with a more conventional good-and-evil battle. Today’s Lovecraft fans disparage Derleth for this and have largely jettisoned his contributions, but like it or not, he founded the publishing company Arkham House, which is largely responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s work and making it generally well known.
Derleth took offense at Wilson’s dismissal of Lovecraft and challenged him to write his own Lovecraftian fiction. Wilson obliged, first producing The Mind Parasites and following it up with the novel before us, The Philosopher’s Stone.
Wilson, as he explains in his foreword, sincerely believed he could do Lovecraft better than Lovecraft did. However, there is a reason you’ve heard of Lovecraft and (in all likelihood) haven’t heard of Wilson.
The reason is, this book sucks.