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suffused with a greater potential, with a greater potency of meaning than the notions of
his more reliable, pedestrian contemporaries. Laudanum as compared with Alcopops.
Value of Grant: as paranormal pit-canary and as point-man, Kenneth Grant has
been prepared to roll his sleeves up and plunge elbow deep in the “Qlipothic slime” of
his imagination, benefiting those of us who’d rather watch from a safe distance. In
amongst the vast amount of tentacled and slithering bug-eyed junk he trawls up in his
nets there have been pearls of an impressive size and lustre. It is hard to name another
single living individual who has done more to shape contemporary western thinking
with regard to Magic. If we should dismiss him and his work, on what grounds should
we do so? That he’s dark? That he’s as mad as tits on a piranha? That he’s weird? As if
the world of the occult was the last place one should expect to find darkness, insanity or
weirdness. Rather, we should recognise Grant as a pioneer, if only by the arrows in his
back; a fabulous arcane adventurer of an old school that’s long since disappeared, if
indeed it was ever “really” there; more a successor to John Silence, Simon Iff, Carnacki
and the gang than a mere Crowley acolyte.
Against the Light is a rip-roaring arcane text, two-fisted occultism. Read as novel or
as magic treatise, it will fail to satisfy, having neither the neat structure of fiction nor the
compelling credibility of fact. Read as an incredible chimaeric hybrid of the two, and
thus a striking comment on the strange interrelationship between them, it could
conversely be seen as a bold, decadent masterpiece, a communiqué from reason’s furthest
reaches, and beyond. It’s to be hoped that the response of the occult book-buying public
is sufficient to encourage Starfire Publishing to release any subsequent “Nightside
Narratives”, granting us further access to Grant’s logbook as he presses on with his
safari into nightmare. Magic’s Mr Kurtz seeking his Heart of Darkness. As a bulletin
from that internal, fictive dark, Against the Light reminds us that the shadow holds its
own form of illumination. Highly recommended for those with an interest in the point
where the extremes of magic meet the furthest, most precarious edge of fantasy and
fiction. This is Hardcore.
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