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I'm not much of a fan of Wilson (have only read 3 of his books, Outsider included).

But this is an unbearable, typically provincial, English critique of his work, complete with class-based explanations and snobbery, attacks on him being an autodidact and so on.

I'm not ashamed to admit it: I like Colin Wilson. He was a great synthesizer of knowledge. His books contain a wealth of ideas, and have introduced me to many authors and thinkers who I may have otherwise missed. I definitely recommend "The Outsider" to anyone interested in philosophy in general and Existentialism in particular.
Wilson was a very uneven author. Some of his stuff is brilliant. Other works seem like something knocked out over the weekend to pay the bills (which they may well have been).

I don't think he deserves to be judged nearly as harshly as this article does. I strongly suspect that Wilson's gravest sin in the eyes of the author was his rejection of Marxism (which, of course, automatically makes him a "fascist" by the standards that seem to prevail in the "literary" community).

Wilson, despite his willingness to take on some really far-out stuff, really is something of a lesser light and a product of his time... his work seemed dated when i was interested in it, and that was a long time ago.

Wilson's persistent fascination with the occult and hidden potentials of "consciousness" (which he accepts as being a sort of fixed thing in all of history)--and his relative willingness to accept without much criticism the authoritarian elements of a huge swatch of that milieu--does lend itself to this explanation.

OTOH his tendency to resort to epicycles in explaining his theories (which are usually postulating, rather than explaining, something) is more the sign of an undisciplined thinker. On edit, Wilson seems like the hippie answer to J.G. Ballard, whose essay on the "half-educated man" seems relevant for what Wilson stumbles towards. Granted, in the wikipedia era, that's all of us.

Lifeforce is a great movie, though. Definitely better than the book.

This echoes a conversation I have often with my girlfriend; how art and qualitative works are ranked in society.

An artist seems to have to be general enough to appeal and be understood by an audience while original enough to be compared to other genius on method but not content.

That is abstract but hopefully the point was there. The second piece is groupthink. For example, what would happen if the first 10 well respected critics said his follow on novel was so brilliant it outshined his earlier work. I don't know, but there as a degree of taste shaping, a degree of originality & and a degree of tradition that make up the "value" and it is interesting to think about.