Stanley, Colin. Colin Wilson's 'Outsider Cycle': a guide for students (2009). Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-96-9 Wilson disagrees. "I suspect that I am probably the greatest writer of the 20th century," he says. "In 500 years time, they'll say, 'Wilson was a genius', because I'm a turning-point in intellectual history.'

Stanley, Colin (ed). The Sage of Tetherdown: Recollections of Colin Wilson by his friends (2020) Nottingham: Paupers' Press. ISBN 9780995597884 I read this book twice before I was 20 years old, and I think that might be the best time to read it. It turned me on to a lot of other writers and historical figures I might never have sought out on my own, and the experience he talks about throughout the book is something that probably freaks out a lot of people, usually young adults, when it happens to them, which isn't often at all, but when it does, it is such a relief to know you're not alone, and a lot of people much more intelligent, insightful, and creative than we'll ever be wrote some really great things about it, including Colin Wilson himself, who never seemed able to come up with another book as good as this one. Though the space vampires movie was awesome!

Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson's 'Ritual in the Dark' "Colin Wilson: Ritual in the Dark". Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 24 February 2013. Now, this might not sound precisely like enjoyable holiday reading, but once you open this book and begin to grasp its central idea, I defy you not to be hooked! Wilson takes your mind to new limits, demolishing mental walls as if they did not exist, in such a way that you can never look at mundane existence in quite the same way again. Rapatahana, Vaughan. More than the Existentialist Outsider: reflections on the work of Colin Wilson (2019), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 9780995597839

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition and co ntro l, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject — but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit — the habit of inferiority to our full self — that is bad.” Wilson then engages in some detailed case studies of artists who failed in this task and try to understand their weakness – which is either intellectual, of the body or of the emotions. The final chapter is Wilson's attempt at a "great synthesis" in which he justifies his belief that western philosophy is afflicted with a needless pessimistic fallacy. Jason and John have aimed at a 'comprehensive history' of Wilson’s life, from his early days as a disaffected teenager to the success of The Outsider and Wilson’s unexpected celebrity, to his later career as a leading philosopher of consciousness and his last days as a grand old man of English letters. Stanley, Colin An Evolutionary Leap: Colin Wilson and Psychology, (2016), London: Karnac ISBN 9781782204442 Mitchell, Charles P. (2001). A guide to apocalyptic cinema. Greenwood Publishing Group. p.112. ISBN 9780313315275.

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I escaped to Cornwall with my girlfriend Joy, and in due course we started a family. But the intense hostility remained, and my books were often not even reviewed. It was obviously going to take a long time for all the silly publicityto be forgotten - it was still dogging me in the late 1960s. By the late 1960s Wilson had become increasingly interested in metaphysical and occult themes. In 1971, he published The Occult: A History, featuring interpretations on Aleister Crowley, George Gurdjieff, Helena Blavatsky, Kabbalah, primitive magic, Franz Mesmer, Grigori Rasputin, Daniel Dunglas Home and Paracelsus, among others. He also wrote a markedly unsympathetic biography of Crowley, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast, and has written biographies on other spiritual and psychological visionaries, including Gurdjieff, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Rudolf Steiner, and P. D. Ouspensky. Dossor, Howard F. The Philosophy of Colin Wilson: three perspectives (1996), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-58-6 Skidelsky, Robert Oswald Mosley p.503, p.511, Lodestar No.1-Winter 1985/86, No.4-Autumn/Winter 1986, No.7-Winter 1987/88, No.8-Spring 1988, No.9-Summer 1988, No.11-Spring 1989, Stanley, Colin. Colin Wilson's Existential Literary Criticism: a guide for students (2014). Nottingham: Paupers' Press. ISBN 9780956866349

The climax to an increasingly acrid campaign came when the father of his lover and later second wife, Joy Stewart, found Wilson's notes for Ritual in the Dark. Mistaking these for a diary, he burst into a dinner party with a horse-whip shouting: "You're a homosexual with six mistresses." The incident made the papers, and Wilson passed on his actual diary to the Daily Mail – which published his claims to be "the major literary genius of our century". Moorhouse, John & Newman, Paul. Colin Wilson, two essays (1988), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-11-X Published to immense acclaim in the mid-1950s, The Outsider helped make popular the literary concept of existentialism. Authors like Sartre, Kafka, Hemingway, and Dostoyevsky, as well as artists like Van Gogh and Nijinsky, delved for a deeper understanding of the human condition in their work, and Colin Wilson’s landmark book encapsulated a character found time and time again: the outsider. I particularly enjoyed his account of how, as a panty-fetishist and visiting lecturer at an American university, he contrived to look up his students' skirts with the aid of a glass-bottomed mug. But the story of his struggle to become a writer, and the tenacity with which he stayed one - despite the fact that even his publisher advised him to give up - is heroic and strangely moving.

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Sure, I know it hurts, he seemed to say, but what of Dostoevsky and all the Other Outsiders who TURNED THEMSELVES AROUND AND MADE A MAN OF THEMSELVES? He met Joy on one of his countless temporary jobs - he was a Christmas shop assistant and she was in charge of the cash registers. He fell for her immediately, partly because she was middle-class. 'I knew I could never bear a girl who talked with a Leicester accent or with any kind of local accent. And when I heard Joy, I thought "Oh marvellous, that's what I want." And when I asked her, "What books have you got on your shelf?" and she said she'd got Yeats and Ulysses, and Proust in French, I thought, "My God, that's the girl I really want!" Betty didn't read at all.' Wilson followed The Outsider with six philosophical titles, which have become known as The Outsider Cycle: Religion and the Rebel (1957), The Age of Defeat ( The Stature of Man in the U.S., 1959), The Strength to Dream (1962), Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), Beyond the Outsider (1965) and the summary volume Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966). These were accompanied by a string of novels aimed at putting his philosophical ideas into action. Spurgeon, Brad. Colin Wilson: philosopher of optimism, (2006), Manchester: Michael Butterworth ISBN 0-9552672-0-X

However, above all it set the ball rolling for me to look for deeper truths than the ones conventionally provided by society. So, it had extra-literary consequences, and it is not many books that do that. (This is why I can't be objective and can't simply consider the book as a literary creation.) John is an admirer of Wilson’s work, while Jason knew Wilson and once had plans to work with him on a series with Uri Geller. Jason said: 'It's a great honour to present the first episode of our six-part series. It's been a great journey of rediscovery, delving into every aspect of this fascinating cultural figure's life and work. His body of work is astounding, and his philosophies are a great practical help to any inquiring mind.'Stanley, Colin (ed). Reflections on the work of Colin Wilson: Proceedings of the Second International Colin Wilson Conference, University of Nottingham July 6-8, 2018 (2019). Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. ISBN 978-1-5275-2774-4 Tredell, Nicolas. Novels to Some Purpose: the fiction of Colin Wilson (2015) Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 9780956866363