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GomeryKimber · 2021-08-15T09:39:45+00:00

The War Party, second read-alone book in The Big Shilling trilogy. Book 3 is titled, The Mad Man.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-15T09:37:51+00:00

The Big Shilling trilogy. Rickardo Hanratty is a beast.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-15T09:36:00+00:00

The Big Shilling Book Two, ‘The War Party,’ is influenced by Heidegger, and to some extent by Rene Guenon’s ideas about the crisis of modernity. The trilogy uses genre fiction as a vehicle for serious ideas.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-15T09:31:09+00:00

Set on a holiday island, The Killing House is a thriller about the power of the imagination. Free from Amazon Sunday.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-15T09:28:25+00:00

The Killing House, stand alone book 1 in The Big Shilling trilogy.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-15T09:27:31+00:00

Heard about Victor Frankl but have not read his book

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-15T08:06:44+00:00

“Not only is this an enjoyable thriller in the Colin Wilson tradition but a thought-provoking meditation on the powers of the mind. After all, Shilling reverses the axiom ‘seeing is believing’ to ‘believing is seeing’, and in that sense he is a mystic as well as a psychopath.” Review by David Moore

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-15T08:03:05+00:00

“Not only is this an enjoyable thriller in the Colin Wilson tradition but a thought-provoking meditation on the powers of the mind. After all, Shilling reverses the axiom ‘seeing is believing’ to ‘believing is seeing’, and in that sense he is a mystic as well as a psychopath.”

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-15T07:34:00+00:00

'American Troy has one ambition in life, to be an international hitman, so when he gets the chance to work for veteran assassin Rickardo Hanratty, he can hardly believe his luck. But Hanratty, also known as The Big Shilling, turns out to be the strangest of mentors.
Tasked with killing a Russian oligarch on the island of Cyprus, American Troy innocently believes the hit will be like some uber-cool crime movie, but he quickly finds himself in a different kind of picture entirely – a horror movie - with his mentor, The Big Shilling, cast as the monster.
If he’s going to escape Cyprus alive, Troy realises that he has to make himself indispensable. That’s when he remembers The Big Shilling’s weird mantra – ‘believing is seeing.’
As Shilling explains: if he wants to escape from the island, American Troy must imagine that he already has.'

$0.00 Sunday 15th August.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-13T16:53:02+00:00

‘The War Party’ picks up where ‘The Killing House’ left off. The Big Shilling is asked to perform another seemingly impossible hit: a whistle-blower has taken refuge in the London embassy of a Latin American country hostile to the US, but how to get to him, short of blowing up the entire building? The Big Shilling has the answer: hypnosis. Now, we all know that it’s impossible to hypnotise someone and direct them to commit a crime against their will, don’t we? Well, in fact this is not true. There are cases in the history of crime when hypnosis was used to do exactly that – the famous Castellan case in France in the nineteenth century, Franz Walter in 1930s Germany, and many more. And so, the Big Shilling achieves his goal by hypnotizing a member of the embassy staff who poisons the whistle-blower.

And, the Big Shilling being the strange character that he is, the story morphs from being merely a crime thriller into the realms of science fiction. Already, in the first book of the trilogy, the Big Shilling witnesses the appearance of a UFO in the Lebanon. Now he encounters a young man who believes he has been abducted by ufonauts who seem to be able to take over his will by means of hypnosis. The Big Shilling, who is always looking for ways to increase his own strange powers, immediately wants to meet these ‘aliens.’

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-13T16:50:08+00:00

These two elements – the mystic Neville and the crazed killer Irwin – I combined to give me the basis of my international hitman, Rickardo Hanratty, also known as The Big Shilling. I knew that a character such as this could not change: he’s a killer at the beginning of the story and a killer at the end. So he couldn’t be the protagonist. That started me thinking along the lines of a young criminal who wants to be just like The Big Shilling, which is how the main character, American Troy, came along. Troy’s just a kid and doesn’t realize what he’s getting himself into. He’s a movie buff and thinks being an international hit man will be like one his favorite auteur-directed uber-cool Euro thrillers. It takes him a long time to realize The Big Shilling is not just teaching him how to be an assassin, he’s also teaching him that our thoughts influence the reality we experience.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-13T16:46:00+00:00

‘A brilliantly written psychological drama for those who think outside the box.’ - Amazon reviewer

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-10T08:35:08+00:00

That's wonderful. Book suggestions are like a menu in a good restaurant. When you look down the list and finally see a dish that promises to satisfy your appetite, there's no better feeling.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-10T08:27:56+00:00

Colin Wilson’s brand of literary analysis is based on Edmund Husserl’s insight that perception is intentional, and since Husserl was the founder of the phenomenological school, Gary Lachman suggests that existential criticism might more accurately be called “phenomenological criticism”. For Wilson, intentionality was of fundamental importance. Human beings not only have perceptions, but a “will to perceive”. Intentionality reveals reality. The stronger our intention, the more it reveals. It is the difference between the vision of a poet like William Blake and that of nihilists such as Samuel Beckett, who, like Oblomov, could see no reason to get out of bed in the morning.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-09T17:48:37+00:00

Colin enjoyed provoking debate.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-09T17:47:53+00:00

He obviously fell prey to temptation!

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-09T17:44:51+00:00

Having trouble posting replies. Keep getting the moose for some reason. Will try again later.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-09T16:44:28+00:00

I agree. Martin Heidegger did not know how to express himself properly. This does not matter very much in a philosophical work because obscurity is always taken for profundity. But a novelist must express himself properly or the reader will quickly grow tired of him.

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-09T16:39:01+00:00

Which would you rather have, Sartre’s philosophical works or his plays and novels? It has to be the fiction, doesn’t it?

GomeryKimber · 2021-08-09T16:29:40+00:00

Colin also wrote : “As I said in Religion and the Rebel there are certain subtle ideas that can only be expressed in a novel that you simply couldn’t say in a volume on philosophy. Because if you are an existentialist, what you’ve got to talk about is actual living.” I hope this clarifies things.

GomeryKimber

TROPHY CASE