Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites

It has been a while since I "borrowed" a book from a local coffee shop.  The last time I did so, I was delighted with the results -- a book that seemed to be written by a lunatic.  This inspired me to pick this one up, and I am now convinced that all books left in coffee shops are written by the insane.

Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites is something of a cult classic, as it turns out, but this does not mean that it is any good. Indeed, it is perhaps the worst book I have ever read or, at least, it is in the bottom five.  It is, though, bad in delightful ways, like a B horror film. In essence, super-geniuses of the future discover that hostile alien "mind parasites" have been restraining humanity from achieving our true potential as god-like beings, and it is up to a noble band of man to stop them, at last.

Signs of a novel with serious problems:

1. There are several footnotes throughout.  But not of the amusing sort found, for example, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  Just footnotes.
2. Numerous direct references to phenomenology, a theoretical approach to the world in which the individual's own experience of things ("phenomena") is made central, and frequent mention of philosopher and mathematician (and phenomenologist) Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl.  
3. The use of said phenomenology as a major plot device.
4. The impression that the use of recreational drugs was responsible for the majority of the text.  Indeed, many passages remind me of conversations I've had with friends who have dabbled in such substances:  "They were all so preoccupied with their petty worries, all enmeshed in their personal little daydreams, while we were at last grappling with reality--the only true reality, that of the evolution of the mind."

The narrator's sudden understanding of phenomenology allows him to understand the true nature of the universe, communicate telepathically, move objects with the force of him mind, and, yes, of course, to loose excess weight.  And to become unbearably condescending.  One does not win over audiences by frequently stating "This is very difficult to explain to non-telepaths," or by referring to all of humanity as "squalid, quarrelsome, [and] small minded."

For all of its claims to having unlocked the secrets of the universe, though, it is hard to take all too seriously a science fiction novel written in 1967 (the year of the Summer of Love and of MLK's speaking out against the Vietnam War, among other landmarks), and set centuries in the future, that predicts a major paradigm shift in human consciousness, but fails to predict women's liberation and sees -- in Wilson's term --"negroes" as a threat to civilization.  

I'd recommend this as a horror show, but cautiously, since it seems that many readers have taken it seriously.