I was recently interviewed by Phil Ford and JF Martel for their Weird Studies podcast. The episode dropped today: The Daemon Speaks, with Matt Cardin Episode description: Returning guest Matt Cardin is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose focus on numinous horror places him in the literary lineage of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood….
Category: Arts & Entertainment
WHAT THE DAEMON SAID an Amazon #1 seller
Just a quick note to Teeming Brain readers to observe that as of today, the Kindle edition of my What the Daemon Said is the #1 new release in Amazon’s Gothic and Romantic Literary Criticism category. It also sits at #10 overall in Horror and Supernatural Literary Criticism. You can order from Amazon here. Or…
View the index for WHAT THE DAEMON SAID
Today is the official publication date for What the Daemon Said. John Shirley calls it “a fine, wide-ranging exploration of the deepest wellsprings of nightmare and chthonic revelation.” Laird Barron calls it “a treasure trove for fans and scholars of weird fiction.” Brian Keene calls it “a crucial deep dive into some of the darkest,…
Dreams and Demons in Modern Horror Fiction
The quoted text below appears in the 2002 book Demons of the Modern World by Malcolm McGrath, who was a doctoral candidate in political philosophy at Oxford University when he wrote it. The publisher’s marketing copy lays out the book’s thrust: This fascinating discussion of modern demonology focuses on our ability to differentiate the physical…
Video essay: Thomas Ligotti and the Polish Avant-Garde
Last summer I became aware of this rather brilliant video essay by Sam Pulham, co-host of the Sherds Podcast, “a literary discussion programme exploring the peripheries of world literature and unearthing neglected texts from outside the mainstream canon.” Pulham’s thesis is that the weird supernatural-horrific sensibility that infuses and defines Ligotti’s 2006 fiction collection Teatro…
My January 2022 interview on the Lovecraft eZine podcast
Early last month I was the featured guest on an episode of the Lovecraft eZine podcast. Here’s the conversation, in which the free-flowing topics included include Ligotti, Lovecraft, Jon Padgett, weird fiction, religion, Leviathan, Behemoth, sleep paralysis, and belief vs. spiritual awakening. You can also listen to the audio podcast version, where my audio levels…
A haunting choral setting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
The Ghostly Art: All Writing Is Haunted
Powerful insights from Ed Simon, Editor-at-Large for LARB’s Marginalia, in an essay for The Millions in which he not only traces a history of hauntedness in various key works of literature (by the likes of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Morrison, Chambers, Lovecraft, and King) but relates a couple of his own genuinely weird personal encounters with…
Horror Fiction and the Awakening and Evolution of Consciousness
In the introduction to The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult — an anthology of classic horror stories that deal in one way or another with the named subjects — Lon Milo DuQuette, who also edited the book, relates his boyhood experience of awakening for the first time to both a love of richly…
A Blessed Silence: On Solving Writer’s Block by Accepting It
Victoria Nelson’s On Writer’s Block: A New Approach to Creativity has long been one of the core entries in my library of books on writing and the creative process. Now I’m fascinated to see Brandon Taylor, author of the widely acclaimed novel Real Life and the just-released fiction collection Filthy Animals, talking about his own…