kaos

planes of narrative as pretty interchangeable. We’re dragged, with the narrator, from
the glittering hallucinatory bowels of a Lovecraftian underworld, through West End
London and into the scrying bowl, often within a page. Adding to the disorienting
nature of the tale is the narrator’s almost total lack of any recognisable emotional reaction
to the Bosch-like apparitions he is constantly confronted by. The literary influence of
Lovecraft, obviously a writer much admired by Grant, shows here in the flatness of
human characterisation when compared to the vivid and chop-smacking depictions of
the narrative’s squamous, trans-human horrors.
This lack of emotional response, if we are dealing with an actual account of Grant’s
experiences rather than fantastic fiction, conveys an absence of affect that turns the
landscape of the prose, merely hallucinatory before, into a genuinely psychopathic vista,
both obsessive and unsettling. But are we dealing, here, with real experience? If so, real
in what sense? Is this a standard horror yarn with an authoritative occult gloss? Is this
the fleshed-out record of a ritual working, or a glimpse into the marvellous rubbish left
by the collapse of an extraordinary mind? Just what in hell, exactly, are we looking at?
Obviously, the simplest course of action would be to conclude that Grant’s work
represents no more than funny-coloured bedlam froth, a warning to the rest of us about
what happens when you start believing outré things and hang round with Aleister
Crowley. This, however, leads us back to our original dilemma: if Grant’s opus can be
neatly summed up as merely incoherent ravings, why do most occultists that I know,
myself included, have more or less everything that Grant has ever published resting on
our shelves? Also, how shall we square a view of Grant as foaming lunatic with the
same Kenneth Grant who has contributed so much of worth to the contemporary occult
worldview? Without Grant to champion the then-all-but-forgotten works of his friend
Austin Osman Spare, the artist would now be remembered as a minor fantasist who
sometimes did the odd impressive nude (this was the view advanced in the dismissive,
limp obituary notices that Spare’s contemporary critics heaped upon him). Without
Grant’s insistence that the works of H P Lovecraft represented valid channels of magical
information, much of the furniture and landscape of our modern magic systems, Chaos
magic for example, would be utterly unrecognisable. A sasquatch at a vicarage teaparty,
Grant is too big to dismiss, too weird to feel entirely comfortable about. What
shall we make of Kenneth Grant?
The answer, if indeed there is an answer, might lie part-concealed within Against the
Light’s seemingly cryptic subtitle, A Nightside Narrative. Is this a simple flourish, a
mere gothic affectation, or could it be an attempt to provide a label that is both more
accurate and more explanatory than plain unvarnished “fiction”?
Let us pause here to consider the essential nature of Grant’s contributions to the
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