The events of this novel follow those of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra (also titled Voyage to Venus) and once again feature the philologist Elwin Ransom.

The novel was heavily influenced by the writing of Lewis's friend and fellow Inkling Charles Williams, and is markedly dystopian in style.

In the foreword, Lewis states that the novel's point is the same as that of his 1943 non-fiction work The Abolition of Man, which argues that there are natural laws and objective values that education should teach children to recognise.

The sale is controversial since the land in question (Bragdon Wood) is an ancient woodland believed to be the resting place of Merlin.

When Jane talks about her dreams, Mrs. Dimble leads her to seek counsel from a Miss Ironwood who lives in the Manor in the nearby town of St Anne's.

Mark is finally given work: to write pseudonymous newspaper articles supporting the N.I.C.E., including two for use after a riot they intend to provoke in Edgestow.

This turns out to be a literal head – that of a recently guillotined French scientist (as Jane dreamed) which Filostrato erroneously believes he has restored to life by his own efforts.

In preparation for this he begins a bizarre program led by Professor Frost of training intended to cultivate absolute objectivity by relegating emotion to the status of a chemical phenomenon.

The novel is set in post-war England, in the fictional English town of Edgestow, in approximately 1948 according to the internal timeline of 'The Cosmic Trilogy'.

Elwin Ransom, introduced in the novel in Chapter 7, is the protagonist of the first two books in Lewis's space trilogy, and his point of view dominates their narrative.

Lord Feverstone (formerly Dick Devine) was a villain in the first novel who, along with Professor Weston, had abducted Ransom to Mars in the mistaken belief that the Martians required a sacrifice.

The first two books fully explicate Lewis's mythology (based on a combination of the Bible and medieval cosmology)[4] according to which each planet of the solar system is ruled by an angelic spirit.

A significant element of the book (Lewis rated it as "second in importance") is to illustrate the destructive folly of seeking power and prestige by belonging to a ruling clique or inner circle.

[5] Somewhat like the early Gnostics, the main antagonists of That Hideous Strength despise the human body and all organic life as frail, corrupted, and unworthy of pure mind.

[citation needed] Lewis portrays the consequences of these ideas as a dystopian nightmare: by rejecting God and His creation, the N.I.C.E inevitably falls under the dominion of demons (whom they imagine to have discovered under the guise of "Macrobes").

[...] If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls 'Forces' while denying the existence of 'spirits'—then the end of the war will be in sight.

[5] In contrast, Lewis portrays reality as supporting Christian tenets such as the inherent sinfulness of humanity, the impossibility of humans perfecting themselves apart from God, the essential goodness of the physical body (though currently corrupted by sin), the omnipotence of God against the limited powers of evil, and the existence of angels and demons.

[citation needed] Lewis started writing That Hideous Strength during World War II,[7] finishing the first draft in 1943.

[7] During the War, Lewis taught at Oxford University and among other writing projects worked on the last two books of his "Space Trilogy"—Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength.

[8] The novel makes reference to "Numinor and the True West", which Lewis credits as a then-unpublished creation of J. R. R. Tolkien; they were friends and colleagues at Oxford University and fellow members of the Inklings.

Brenton D. G. Dickieson writes, "Williams' idea of Logres emerges in That Hideous Strength, forming the speculative framework of a good-evil dialectic in the apocalyptic narrative of this last Ransom chronicle".

"[11] Some two years before writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell reviewed That Hideous Strength for the Manchester Evening News, commenting: "Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr Lewis attributes to his characters [the N.I.C.E.

is overthrown by divine intervention: "[Lewis] is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader's sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance.

He criticised the character of Studdock as uninteresting, noting that "it is hard to get excited about the vagaries of a young, insecure and ambitious academic figure whose main concern is to get into an inner circle, any inner circle", but praised the plotting of the book: "The hunt of Ransom's remnant for the real Merlin while the villains capture the false one is as vivid as a passage in Stevenson."

B. S. Haldane published two essays attacking Lewis's negative views on science and progress, as he saw them; the first was entitled "Auld Hornie, F.R.S.".

[5] Alister McGrath says the novel "shows [C. S. Lewis] to have been a prophetic voice, offering a radical challenge to the accepted social wisdom of his own generation".