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Book Review: 'The Portals' by Edward Andrew Mann
'The Portals' first was published in hardcover in 1974. This Granada / Panther edition (204 pp.) was released in the UK in 1975.
The novel is set in California in the early 1970s. In the opening chapters we are introduced to protagonist Cary Ralston, an attorney whose practice has provided him with a very comfortable lifestyle, including a home in Beverly Hills. On a trip to France, Ralston decides to attend an auction held at the estate of the late aristocrat Henri de Chantille, a man with an interest in archeology and philology. An avid collector of antiquarian books, Ralston bids on, and wins, a box of books from de Chantille's library. When back at his home in the Hills, Ralston pokes through the box, where he finds a massive tome written in a strange language.
Excited by this discovery, Ralston peruses the book, and realizes that it dates from medieval times (or even earlier) and it may deal with various aspects of magic and the occult, as a previous owner has annotated the text with the words 'Mu', 'Necronomicon', and 'The Philosopher's Stone'.
Ralston arranges for Professor Nelson, an archeologist at the nearby University of California Los Angeles, to examine the book in detail. While Nelson is stymied by the arcane language used in the book, he does see some success by asking physicists and mathematicians to decipher the symbols used in what appear to be equations contained in the text.
As work progresses on the book, eerie events intrude: Nelson has strange dreams of otherworldly places and entities. Could the book in fact be a 'portal' in the sense of unlocking the human subconscious, and allowing it to experience things from either the distant past, or the far future ?
When a gruesome murder takes place in Los Angeles, and the victim has links to the effort to translate the book, addressing the book's function as a portal becomes even more important. But as Cary Ralston and his colleagues are to discover, there are some Eldritch Secrets that best are left alone.......
Within the first few pages of reading 'The Portals' I began wondering if the book had in fact been written by the UK writer Colin Wilson (1931 - 2013) using the pseudonym 'Edward Andrew Mann'. This is because 'The Portal' is very reminiscent of Wilson's novels 'The Mind Parasites', 'The Philosopher's Stone', and the nonfiction 'The Occult'. There is much of Wilson's approach to prose in 'The Portal', including all manner of esoteric allusions to lost civilizations; the conflict between the Cthulhu Mythos's Elder Gods and Great Old Ones; and the doctrines of Theosophy, ESP, astral projection, and the hidden powers of the human mind, all components of Wilson's philosophy of 'New Existentialism'. Indeed, later in the novel Wilson's term 'Faculty X' is introduced.
Unfortunately, 'The Portals' fails to do anything exciting with these tropes. Much of the narrative is static in nature, focused on lengthy conversations among the lead characters; it is understood that these conversations impart to the reader the tenets of New Existentialism. As a result, the book tends to present more as a treatise, rather than a novel designed for entertainment. And when in the denouement the 'cosmic horror' stated in the book's cover blurb finally arrives, it is underwhelming.
The verdict ? 'The Portals' seeks, through the vehicle of a science fiction / horror novel, to be a rewarding treatment of Lovecraftian and Wilsonian themes, but never succeeds in capitalizing on those themes in an imaginative or overly engaging way. It's deserving of no more than a Two-Star Rating.
