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introduced to yet another member of Clan Grant, this time an ancestor named Margaret
Wyard who, the author gleefully informs us, is alleged to have claimed carnal knowledge
of the Devil in a bestial form at ufo hotspot Rendlesham Forest during the sixteenth
century. Just as we’re starting to appreciate how much fun Christmas family reunions at
the Grant place must have been, we’re whisked away into the body of a narrative where
the first person author and a scryer-for-hire named Margaret Leesing attempt to solve
the interlocking mysteries of Margaret Wyard and the grimoire, leading them into the
world of shrieking cosmic horror where Grant at least seems to feel most at home,
most thoroughly relaxed.
Nothing about the style of Grant’s delivery throughout the book distinguishes Against
the Light from the preceding non-fictional work. The author’s voice has the same
worryingly straight-faced tone to which the readers have become accustomed, and instead
of any novelistic structure we see Grant employ his usual device of sweeping a vast pile
of fascinating information up into one place, then chopping it out arbitrarily into a
semblance of individual chapters. Characters familiar from Grant’s previous work recur:
Crowley himself, along with Austin Osman Spare, Yeld Paterson and Black Eagle,
Spare’s famous spirit guide. The anecdotes describing ritual events and states are not
intrinsically more unbelievable than those to be found in Grant’s earlier work, except
that here they occupy more space. Presenting his account, the author does not seem less
earnest or less anxious to convince than he seems in Nightside of Eden or Outside the
Circles of Time.
Given the above, attempting to critique Against the Light by the same terms one
would apply to, say, a current horror-fantasy novella would seem both redundant and
unfair. Should we then treat the book as an expanded ritual journal, a straightforward
piece of magical reportage, only differing from Grant’s previous work in its ratio of
anecdote to ideology? Again, this presents difficulties, not least being that alongside all
the genuine occult celebrities woven into Grant’s tale we also find clearly fictitious
personages such as Helen Vaughn, half-human heroine of Arthur Machen’s work The
Great God Pan, or Richard Pickman, the doomed artist spirited away by ghouls in H P
Lovecraft’s Pickman’s Model. Throw in Sin Sin Wa, an astral Chinaman who seems to
be the model for Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, and one begins to grasp the full dimension
of the problem.
Complicating matters is the nature of the narrative itself, with certain passages
apparently intended to take place somewhere at least within the vague proximity of
ordinary reality, while other parts plunge us into scryed scenes from history or else fullfledged
shamanic visions. Furthermore, Grant seldom bothers to make the transition
between one state and another absolutely clear and, indeed, seems to see the different
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