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Product Description
Product Description
Charles Williams had a genius for choosing strange and exciting themes for his novels and making them believable and profoundly suggestive of spiritual truths. All Hallows' Eve is the story of a man and woman whose love was so great it could bridge the gap of death; of evil so terrible as to be unmentionable, of a vision so beautiful it must be true.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Makes the supernatural world seem as "real" as the natural,
By
This review is from: All Hallows' Eve (Paperback)
While the premise of ghosts as major characters took a little bit to adjust to, I found that Williams developed supernatural characters and a supernatural world that seemed as solid and "real" as the natural world. It is a wonderful novel that explores so many deep concepts - heaven and hell, the reality of the supernatural, the nature of evil and its limitations, body and soul,... In fact, the main difficulty with the novel is the fact that it explores so many deep questions, and dwells so much on the inner thoughts of the characters. These aspects make the novel a difficult (yet rewarding) read. I found that I needed several hours of completely uninterrupted time to really get into the novel. Then, I couldn't put it down.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Charles Williams: The Patron Saint of Goth,
By Gord Wilson "alivingdog.com" (Bellingham, WA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: All Hallows' Eve (Paperback)
Regent College has done us all a service by reprinting Charles Williams' best novel. Oddly enough, it's the one many readers have missed because it wasn't reprinted when Eerdmans brought out the various editions of his other half dozen novels. This is thinking man's(or woman's) Goth; there are more ideas in one chapter than in an entire Stephen King novel. Another difference is it's the Good and not evil that is truly terrifying (evil is a shade or shadow of the Good). The occultic plots are somewhat drawn from Williams' involvement in The Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society headed by A.E.Waite, best known for the Waite Tarot Deck. Its members variously included poet W.B.Yeats (known for his poem, "The Second Coming") and Evelyn Underhill, author of Mysticism. At one point, Aleister Crowley, the self-styled "Great Beast," attempted to wrestle control of The Golden Dawn, and one can only speculate what the outcome would have been had the many converts to Crowley's "Magick" have stumbled on Williams' books instead. Instead of "Mr. Crowley," would Ozzy be singing "Mr. Williams?" Instead of buying Crowley's mansion and opening occult bookstores to propagate his teachings, would Jimmy Page have renovated Williams' tiny flat and opened Golden Dawn branches all over England? Would "Stairway to Heaven" be about the Web of Souls and Exchange and the Way of Affirmation and vicariously bearing burdens and the Holy Graal and coinherence and all the rest of Williams' dazzling ideas? Who knows? But this reader joins the many who, having encountered Charles Williams, will never be the same.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Possible, believable picture of Evil,
By Elsie Wilson (Aberystwyth, Cymru) - See all my reviews
This review is from: All Hallows' Eve (Paperback)
This probably qualifies as the strangest book i've read all year. I was reminded of Williams by reading C.S. Lewis's letters; i had read one of his books before, "Descent into Hell" i think, and remembered the strangeness, but this really is amazing. How many other books do you know in which one of the two main characters is dead, in which the dead and living can communicate almost as easily as we do every day, in which magic is serious and scary? Mainstream books, that is, not Goosebumps, with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, with the whole thing to be understood as at least feasible if not truth. This is unusual. And yet, and yet the whole thing works. It is the story of two dead women, killed during an air raid on war-torn London, and the choices they make ~ or the choices they made while alive ~ and how they affect the world of the still living. It is also the story of an evil (American) magus, Simon, who practises (actually, he's very good at it) real black magic. His desire to rule the world, and the plan he has to use his daughter to gain the power to do so, is in the end defeated by Lester, one of the dead women, her husband, his friend, and the friend's fiancée ~ Simon the Clerk's daughter. The evil is real, overbearing, even, though it is bizarre; one gets the idea that all the Clerk does is feasible, that Williams has experienced evil in his life, that he knows whereof he writes. The descriptions of the dead, of the City they inhabit (both London and not-London), are also real, persuasive; Williams must have had some foreknowledge, one feels, to write the way he wrote. Reading him takes quite an investment, of time, of thought, of disbelief suspension; it is, however, well worth the cost: The payoff is a gripping book, plenty of thought, and a clearer vision of life. I shall have to read another Williams, but perhaps not too soon.
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