Colin Burrow writes:

What Crowley’s fiction perhaps always risks is a kind of what-the-hell scepticism, in which anyone might as well believe anything, and in which, even if you don’t find the grail, or finish the book on the history of magic which you’re supposed to be writing, or marry the right Rose, you’re still OK because you can keep on reimagining history. At not quite the end of Endless Things the fictional novelist Fellowes Kraft realises that the philosopher’s stone is not a physical artefact at all, but is something like the capacity to reinvent the world in historical fictions: ‘Give me the base stuff of the world, sadness and nightmare and things tortured in the black smithy of history, and I will turn it all to gold, sophic, wonderful, gold that can’t be spent.’ That is Crowley’s peculiar kind of fantasy: a conscious substitute for the magic in which you don’t quite believe any more.

(LRB 1 November 2007)

Small Beer | hardback 341 pp. |ISBN: 9781931520225