The Abominable Superman

RITUAL IN THE DARK (442 pp.)--Colin Wilson--Houghton Mifflin ($4.95).

Colin Wilson likes to go on intellectual safaris, bag a great book and scatter the author's thoughts among the simple natives. His favorite hunting ground is Shawland, where he stalks the Abominable Superman, and he never tires of preaching the first Shavian commandment, which can be read backward or forward: God is the Life Force--the Life Force is God.

Symphonies & Sausage. That a sex murderer may also serve the Life Force is the notion behind Ritual in the Dark, and it will probably convince no one except Author Wilson. Ever since Colin (The Outsider) Wilson scrambled to fame out of a Hampstead Heath sleeping bag five years ago, he has been working on this first novel, loosely modeled on the saga of Jack the Ripper. During three months in 1888, the infamous ripper slashed six women to death, all but one of whom were middleaged, drink-sodden prostitutes. He was never captured.

Wilson's Ripper is Austin Nunne, a Baudelairean esthete and homosexual sadist. Into his orbit drifts a would-be writer named Gerard Sorme, drawn to Nunne partly out of satanic excitement and partly because he seems to share the same ideas about what makes life not worth living. (Sorme is working on a book on "the modern sense of dispossession" that sounds remarkably like Wilson's Outsider.) With the help of "a Mozart symphony, a hot frankfurter sausage, the smell of acetone," Gerard sometimes gets "a new grip on being alive."

More gripping than symphonies and sausages is sex. Through Nunne, Gerard meets Gertrude Quincey, a svelte but fortyish virgin. Her panting, 17-year-old niece Caroline goes to bed with Gerard first, but auntie soon follows. Author Wilson's handling of the love scenes may be summed up in one cozy Briticism ("Her mouth tasted like warm tea"). Some of Nunne's other friends are very different cups of tea, notably, a red-mopped painter named Oliver Glasp, who dilly-Dalis between nudes and Crucifixions. Wilson's defense of such characters is clearly Terence's "Nothing human is alien to me."

Sadistic & Sick. Less clear and distinctly alien is the rationale for Nunne's sadistic murders, all of which occur discreetly offstage. Novelist Wilson's argument is that crime is a thirst for freedom, a chance to wrest a heroic identity from a world of regimented boredom and blurring mediocrity. In a sick society, the superman becomes a monster. A trip to the morgue finally opens Gerard's eyes to the monstrosity of Nunne, but not before the reader has suffered much quasi-Nietzschean chatter to the effect that "if a man could kill all his illusions, he'd become a god."

The illusion Author Wilson may have to kill is that he is a born novelist.

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