The Mind Parasites is an odd book. Its an easy to read book whose narrative breaks down, and whose bizarre ending makes you think the author began taking mescalin half way through the composition. It’s a very clever Lovecraft homage. Its philosophy is terrifying.
First, to the writing style and story. I’d called The Mind Parasites a combination of The Third Policeman, by Brian O’Nolan, and A Colder War, by Charles Stross. Like The Third Police Man, it is a straightforward narrative that is presented as if it is an academic work from the future. The narrator, one of the characters in the Mind Parasites, is himself the object of study, so for example
You can see that it is all a problem of language. I am being forced to make do with one or two words when I need about fifty. It is not quite analogous to describing colours to a blind man, because no human being is entirely “blind”; we all have glimpses of freedom. But freedom has as many colours as the spectrum.
is footnoted with
The above passage comes from a manuscript written in 2005. (M.F.: WHA-3271). We have included it for the sake of continuity. This whole problem is covered in minute detail in Austin’s monumental Life, Being and Language (2025-2041), particular Vol. 8, chaps 7-9.
And The Mind Parasites is like “A Colder War” because it presents the Cthulhu Mythos as real. As the story begins, Unknown Kadath is discovered, buried in Turkey. Inscriptions to The Great Old Ones are found, “impossibly” old. And being the real world, the media overreacts. There’s a greatest archaeological discovery every, ever generation or so. And in that sense complaining about an implausible ending perhaps is unfair — I recall how A Colder War ended!
But the best part of The Mind Parasites is the parasites themselves. It’s the most plausible modern presentation of demonology I’ve encountered. It is as vivid a depiction of the demonic influence as Evangelion Neon Genesis is to angels, or The Great Divorce is to purgatory.
A “mind parasite” is a non-physical creature that obtains energy by eating your thoughts. It replaces some thought or pattern of thought about a person, an action, or a thing with its own. For instance, it may replace a calculated desire for money with greed, or a desire to do more with sloth. The most evolutionary effective parasites are those that leave their hosts alive and in good health. The most successful mind parasite – the most effective demon — are those that would leave the soul in the highest level of purgatory, with the greatest access to the refrigerium.
The mind is considered to be a biological machine, which works around these parasites, and can even incorporate them into its own mechanisms. So the mind of the greedy man, in the example above, might incorporate this greed, using it to other virtues while embedded the parasite in a protective callous, limiting it influence to the business world. Yet while this preserves high mental functioning, it makes the mind parasite more difficult to extract later. Medical doctors use intersecting beams of radiation and chemical treatments to remove such embedded illnesses. God uses fire.
In the worst cases the mind parasites completely colonizes the mind, leaving the victim a zombie of shambling parasitical thought and behaviors. In The Great Divorce, a guide tells the narrator there is hope for a quarrelsome woman, if she is still a murmurer, and not just a murmur. There is hope for any mind infested by parasites, as long as there is a non-parasitical portion of the mind left.
I read The Mind Parasites in the Kindle edition.
