After a major spinal operation in 2011, [24] Wilson suffered a stroke and lost his ability to speak. [25] He was admitted to hospital in October 2013 for pneumonia. He died on 5 December 2013 and was buried in the churchyard at Gorran Churchtown in Cornwall. [5] A memorial service for him was held at St James's Church, Piccadilly, London, on 14 October 2014. His passionate inquiry into his themes continued but critics deserted him. He went out of fashion and – though he published more than 100 works – he survived financially only because many of those dealt with murder or the occult as pathways to the insights that fascinated him. His readership grew to include murder buffs, UFO spotters and new age believers. Typical of this later output was Alien Dawn (1998), marketed with the line "the evidence is overwhelming – they are here". Serialised in the Daily Mail, it undoubtedly made more money than any of his philosophical books. The classic study of alienation, existentialism, and how great artists have portrayed characters who exist on the margins of society. Now, this might not sound precisely like enjoyable holiday reading, but once you open this book and begin to grasp its central idea, I defy you not to be hooked! Wilson takes your mind to new limits, demolishing mental walls as if they did not exist, in such a way that you can never look at mundane existence in quite the same way again.

Sure, I know it hurts, he seemed to say, but what of Dostoevsky and all the Other Outsiders who TURNED THEMSELVES AROUND AND MADE A MAN OF THEMSELVES? Even if you read it with reservations you must admit it provides a reading list of seminal works, mainly of the 20th century: Hermann Hesse, Mann, Tolstoy, T.E. Lawrence, Blake, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Eliot and Yeats ( I only began to read Dostoevsky, Mann and Hesse in my 20s). Even his detractors admit his talent for writing readable summaries of books and riveting biographical outlines. Rapatahana, Vaughan. More than the Existentialist Outsider: reflections on the work of Colin Wilson (2019), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 9780995597839

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Colin Wilson Papers (2 document boxes) housed at the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy of the University of California, Riverside Libraries. Includes correspondence by Wilson, galley proofs and manuscripts of Wilson's works in the science fiction genre, material regarding Uri Geller, press clippings, and interviews with Wilson. Colin Wilson had recently become a slight acquaintance of Anthony Quayle, after meeting him at one of his numerous parties, and after pushing through the crowds, and two lines of policemen, he got to the stage-door and confidently said: “Mr Quayle’s dressing room?”’ Down the corridor and on the left” said the doorman. Wilson saw Marilyn standing alone in front of a mirror where she was trying to pull up, what the Daily Mirror described the next day, “a shimmering gown of red satin”. Wilson noted that, despite her best efforts, the dress ‘was slipping down towards her nipples’ and not wasting the chance of a lifetime, he went to introduce himself – ‘I had been told she was bookish’, he remembered . According to Wilson there was a definite ‘connection’ with Marilyn and she actually grasped his hand as they made their way through the waiting throng to the cars outside. Wilson was also known for what he termed "Existential Criticism", which suggested that a work of art should not just be judged by the principles of literary criticism or theory alone but also by what it has to say, in particular about the meaning and purpose of existence. In his pioneering essay for Chicago Review (Volume 13, no. 2, 1959, pp.152–181) he wrote:

Stanley, Colin. The Nature of Freedom' and other essays (1990), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-17-9 Stanley, Colin An Evolutionary Leap: Colin Wilson and Psychology, (2016), London: Karnac ISBN 9781782204442 Societal interaction, of course, tells us it’s only one little blip on the screen and it’ll all come out in the wash. Will it really? It is not that the “outsider” wants the merely impossible. That would be understandable. One can’t get the moon but if he cries for it long enough he may some day fly there. Strictly speaking, every ideal worthy of man is impossible of complete realization but it can still serve as a guide to choice and action. There is a difference between an ideal that cannot be attained and one that is senseless. An analogous situation holds for the logic of the emotions. One can be sad about the world but one cannot sensibly be indignant with it or shake one’s fist at it unless he believes nature is animate or that it is responsible for its own state. The “outsider” does not believe anyone is responsible for the nature of nature but he is nonetheless in revolt against it. He is a man who, having given up his belief in the existence of God, is still lacerating himself over the problem of evil, unaware that there is no problem of evil to a naturalist but only problems of evil, some remediable, some not; it is not usually possible to determine which is which until human beings pit their courage and intelligence against the obstacles in the struggle to solve them. How awful,' I murmur, resolving to avoid the subject of non-pessimistic existentialism at all costs.Hodder also decided to issue a pamphlet about me and to increase my advance, which troubled me. After 10 years of poor sales, I was afraid it would lose money. But I was proved wrong. The book was not only widely and respectfully reviewed, but sold excellently. So did the US edition, which immediately went into a Book Club edition. The first sign that something was up came two days before publication, when an excited article in the Evening News heralded Wilson as "A Major Writer". The next day he was acclaimed by the two most important critics in the country - Philip Toynbee in the Observer and Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times. "Luminously intelligent," declared an overjoyed Toynbee of Wilson's book. Connolly pronounced it to be "extraordinary", "one of the most remarkable first books I have read for a long time". When it appeared in the bookshops on Monday, it sold out by the end of the afternoon. Stanley, Colin (ed). Reflections on the work of Colin Wilson: Proceedings of the Second International Colin Wilson Conference, University of Nottingham July 6-8, 2018 (2019). Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. ISBN 978-1-5275-2774-4 There was a time when to convict a thinker of absurdity was to place him under an inteltellectual obligation to rise to the argument or change his position. At the very least, it put him in the shadow of impropriety. Today he can escape the obligation and get out from under the shadow by calmly making a philosophy of his predicament. Existentialism as a philosophy of the absurd is the 20th century’s gift to literary men and critics who are terribly excited by ideas but resent the discipline ncessary to analyze them. Mr. Colin Wilson is caught up in this excitement about existentialist profundity. One can plead for him the extenuations of youth and a desultory philosophical education. What is truly astonishing is that he has infected with his enthusiasm for the dramatic and the murky some English critics from whom one had expected more intellectual sophistication.