The God of the Labyrinth (1970), Colin Wilson’s ninth novel and the third of the “Sorme trilogy”, is a heady cocktail which combines a kind of literary detective story, graphic sex scenes, comedy and occult manifestations and which, by incorporating pastiches of eighteenth-century prose, offers more stylistic variety than is usually the case in Wilson’s fiction. (The version published in the US, under the title The Hedonists (1971) was “heavily cut” (Wilson (2005), 275)). The protagonist and first-person narrator of most of God is Gerard Sorme, the central character in Wilson’s first novel, Ritual in the Dark (1960) and his fourth, Man Without A Shadow (1963). Sorme is now in his late thirties and a published writer whose books include The Methods and Techniques of Self-Delusion (on which he was working, under a slightly different...
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "The God of the Labyrinth (aka The Hedonists)". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 September 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23935, accessed 09 June 2026.]
