From the outset, any connection between popular fiction and occultism might seem oxymoronic. After all, if occultism is supposed to be about secrecy and arcane knowledge, what could it possibly have to do with a brashly commercial form of literature which is thoroughly at home in the marketplace, seeks to gain as many readers as possible, and values entertainment more than instruction? Nonetheless, to take the case of Britain alone, occult topics have been fixtures of the popular fiction landscape since the eighteenth-century birth of the Gothic onwards, featuring in the alchemical, Rosicrucian, and Satanic subplots of novels like Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). When, nearly a century later, the cumbersome and costly triple-decker novel finally made way for the sleek and affordable single volume format that has since become the industry standard, occult novels like George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) and Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) topped the newly-constituted best seller lists. In today's increasingly globalised and e-based fiction market, the allure of the occult seems only to have grown, as demonstrated by the remarkable success of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon novels.

Why has occultism so frequently and successfully been co-opted within mainstream literary genres such as the thriller, the romance, the school story, and the horror novel? What new understanding of the development and cultural impact of Western esotericism might we gain by focusing on these texts, rather than just on non-fictional works of occult philosophy which typically have far smaller audiences and lack the dynamic of suspenseful plotting? Although genre fiction might sometimes strike us as sensational, ersatz, or even scurrilous in its approach to esotericism, it urgently requires our attention if we are to understand how occult ideas have been transmitted, commercialised, and given meaning by and for the public.

Within the academy, however, this attention has not been immediately forthcoming. Far more focus has been directed towards the occult dimensions of modernist and avant garde literary movements, some, if by no means all, of which were premised on an explicit rejection of mass culture.