The Flight to Lucifer is the only novel by the American literary critic Harold Bloom (born 1930 in New York). Published during 1979, it was composed as a sequel to the David Lindsay novel A Voyage to Arcturus, which supplied the concept of a voyage through space to a distant planet created by a demiurge, and a few other incidental features of the book. However, most of its content derives fairly directly from Gnosticism, which Bloom had studied.
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The Flight to Lucifer is the only novel by the American literary critic Harold Bloom (born 1930 in New York). Published during 1979, it was composed as a sequel to the David Lindsay novel A Voyage to Arcturus, which supplied the concept of a voyage through space to a distant planet created by a demiurge, and a few other incidental features of the book. However, most of its content derives fairly directly from Gnosticism, which Bloom had studied.
Bloom has stated that he does not like the novel and has disowned it.
In Lindsay's novel, two men, the passionate giant Maskull and the thin, intense Nightspore, are taken from Earth to the planet Tormance by Krag, a mysterious figure who is a residue of the true godhead, Muspel, unassimilated by the false creations of Tormance's demiurge, Crystalman. Bloom's novel reproduces this formula, but with names drawn directly from the history and cosmology of Gnosticism. Maskull becomes Thomas Perscors ("through fire"), and is explicitly identified...
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