100 Books Like The Great Beast

Truly a book for the ages, how could I not recommend this? It is THE iconic book about a constructed being and his consequent travails.

Made by Victor Frankenstein from all sorts of collected detritus, when the monster opens his “yellow, watery eyes,” the scientist flees from him and never looks back. The monster is left to negotiate the world on his own, but much like a newborn baby, he is ignorant and unequipped to do so.

I love how, unlike the popular concept of the monster, he is, in fact, a vegetarian, and at the start, very vulnerable and peaceful. He learns to read by sitting outside a cottage where he can hear the cottagers teaching a foreigner to read.

I wrote a whole novel about him, A Monster’s Notes, which transports him into the 21st century.

Thomas Covernant is a leper shunned by society but finds himself in the Land where some herald him as the one who’ll save them from an evil sorcerer, Lord Foul. He is not always a sympathetic character, but being on society’s edge where all and sundry openly shun him can do that to anyone.

What I loved the most was the captivating Land with its many peoples and inhabitants, such as the sentient woods and the Forestals that ward them, the Elohim, a benign people with special powers, the Giants and the evil Viles, Waynhim, and ur-viles.

Outside being exotic, the world feels credible and immersive, especially the “wild magic” Covernant begins to wield. I ended up caring passionately about what happened to the Land and wanting Covernant to acknowledge his worth.

The most serious and culturally informed of the modern biographies, but still enthusiastic and enjoyable. Sutin is particularly good on Crowley’s religious and political aspects, and it reads unmistakably like a book by what a friend of mine would call “a real grown-up,” which isn’t always the case with books on occult subjects. Sutin makes a strong case for Crowley’s importance and larger significance, and the book’s wider perspective can be gauged by the spread of his solid, quality books on other subjects, including Buddhism and Philip K Dick.  

Weighing in at somewhere over 300,00 words across over 700 pages, this is the most comprehensive Crowley biography. Stylistically is it no great treat for the reader, but it was obviously a staggering amount of work and demands respect: assembling this much material is an achievement. The effect—with generous backup detail on minor figures—is often like a gigantic Wikipedia entry. Kaczynski is one of the Crowley faithful, and he tends to look on the bright side. Consequently the book can be rather pious, as well as occasionally naive (Kaczynski quotes Freud’s supposed lauding of occult artist Austin Osman Spare, for example—one of Spare’s tall tales—as if he really said it, to which you can only say “As if…”). Still a very useful work of reference. 

A relaxed and urbane book by a man who could really write: Booth’s other work includes poetry and the acclaimed novel Hiroshima Joe, along with non-fiction on cannabis and opium, both very relevant to Crowley. It seems to speed up towards the end and has no source notes, which I thought might be because Booth was already racing against the cancer that killed him. Now I think it was just pressure of other work—he was prolific. I was at the launch when alcoholic Crowley disciple Gerald Suster, also a Crowley biographer and also now dead, staggered to his feet and began a rambling question with the Crowley greeting “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” to which Booth cordially replied “93!” The crowd had no idea what they were talking about.      

An atmospheric biography—a book you can curl up with—by British occultist King (not to be confused with the more ‘literary establishment’ Francis King, a respected gay novelist; our man sometimes called himself Francis X King to distinguish between them). King was a quietly eccentric character who had been traumatized by his experiences in the Korean War, and at one stage sold ice cream on Bournemouth beach. Steeped in the Golden Dawn tradition, his other books include works on alchemy, Western esotericism, tantra, and more, and he was a friend of Crowley’s friend Gerald Yorke, who also wrote on those subjects. I’ve always had a soft spot for their charmingly old-school, gentlemanly style of bygone British occult scholarship.

First published in 1956 Dion Fortune recalls her heroine Vivian le Fay, first introduced in The Sea Priestess fifteen years earlier.

In Moon Magic she is conjured as Lilith le Fay, mysterious and alluring. Interestingly, considering Dion Fortune died before finishing the book, its completion was brought about by an acolyte ‘channeling the author’ after her death. 

Her play on the dynamic of the male and female polarity allows the story to evolve on different levels, as an interesting, if dated view of a society in need of a spiritual revelation, and a treatise on genuine esoteric practices. Fortune’s clipped prose style gives the reader's imagination free rein, allowing her to influence our understanding of certain concepts and provide an entertaining tale to boot.

John and Caitin Mathews have a vast body of work on the subject of spirituality. This is one of their first and, in my opinion, one of their best.

I recommend this title to anyone who feels a deep connection to Celtic heritage and the old Gods and Goddesses of early British and Welsh ancestry. I was especially entranced by the pathworking techniques, a guided visualisation journey into the ‘otherworld’ of our native ancestors. Having undertaken several of these guided visualisation journeys, I had some deeply personal and life-enhancing experiences that I still vividly recall some thirty years later.

A great introduction to the Western Mystery Tradition.

To say that Kenneth Grant’s (1924-2011) writing style is idiosyncratic would be a huge understatement, for to read him often equals entering into a dream state shot through with sinister overtones and illumined by the morbid light of witch’s Moon. Grant is mostly known for his “Typhonian Trilogies”–nine volumes that explore Crowley’s Thelema in connection with Lovecraftian mythos, Haitian Vodou, Austin Osman Spare’s art and sigil magic, Asian Tantra, and a number of related subjects.

Grant casts a wide conceptual net over the topics he explores by integrating them as aspects of a putative “Typhonian” or “Draconian” tradition, with its roots in pre-dynastic Egypt, that focuses on the mysteries of sexual magic and gives preeminence to the mystical power of female sexual vibrations. His argument is that this tradition often glossed over as the “left-hand path” sans negative moral connotations in its nomenclature, suffered historical repercussions by the representatives of… show more.

Many children of my generation were turned to the dark side by their parents' collections of Dennis Wheatley's glamorously lurid Black Magic novels.

Key to their appeal was the author's assurance that the diabolical deeds described therein were actually being practised today – from the heart of power in London to the most remote village in the land. Phil Baker's enormously entertaining biography makes it clear that Dennis sincerely believed this, and consulted all the leading magicians of his age – including Aleister Crowley – to get the Goat-based goods from the gate.

Not only that, but his own life was steeped in just as much intrigue and danger as any of his novels, including stints as a WWI solider, peacetime purveyor of Napoleon's own brandy, and WWII member of Churchill's secret services.