The wait is over. The stars are right. Some rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, and my long-awaited Dark Awakenings collection is now loosed upon the world.
- Publisher: Mythos Books
- Date: May 2010
- Length: 319 pages
- Table of Contents: Available at MattCardin.com
Click here to purchase the book directly from the publisher and receive with it a copy of my Curse of the Daimon album of thematically related instrumental music.
You can also buy it (sans the CD) from Amazon, Gavincuss Books, and several additional online booksellers — and then, if you like, buy the album separately at iTunes or CDBaby.
The brand new issue of Dead Reckonings praises the book with these fine words:
It is refreshing to see that there are still authors interested in and capable of portraying a species of dread that is dependent neither on the standard bogeymen of horror fiction nor in pain and the threat of bodily dissolution as ends in themselves….The philosophical and theological bases for Cardin’s horror run deep….[He brings] his ideas to vivid, immediate life through his excellent descriptive skills, believable characters, well-described settings, and an unusually apt gift for choosing metaphors when attempting to describe the ineffable….In “Teeth,” comparative religion, philosophy, and quantum mechanics meet in a mandala that offers the clearest expression of Azathoth as the universal maw since Lovecraft. Perhaps even more devastating is “The God of Foulness,” which posits a cult based on the incarnation through disease of the third god in an unholy trinity, served by a text riddled with redirected, misquoted, and parodied extracts from the world’s spiritual texts. Cardin’s ability to detail the full implications of ideas that utterly destroy “the human need for illusion” reveals the forces behind those ideas in action, without risking anticlimax, and demonstrates the impact they have on the lives of characters in whom readers can recognize themselves; this lends the stories a terrific impact.
— Jim Rockhill, review of Dark Awakenings in Dead Reckonings #7 (Spring 2010)
And don’t forget these other fine endorsements:
“In Dark Awakenings, Cardin proves himself to be an adept in the fullest sense of the word. To both the morbid and the cosmically minded, who may be one and the same, he delivers his visions and nightmares in a master’s prose. In the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, Cardin’s accomplishments as a writer are paralleled by his expertise as a literary critic and theorist, as readers can witness in this volume. His analyses of supernatural horror and its practitioners are also dark awakenings in the dual manner of his stories, with one eye on the black abyss and the other on an enlightened transcendence without denomination. Again, this quality of Cardin’s work can be seen in the writings of Poe and Lovecraft, two other felicitous freaks who merged the antagonistisms of their imagination into a chimera as awful as it is awe-striking.”
— Thomas Ligotti, author of Teatro Grottesco and The Nightmare Factory
“Matt Cardin channels visions of dark, maniacal intensity. His otherworldly divinations will have you lying awake in the dark, counting stars in that most pitiless gulf that yawns above us all. A master of terror and dread, he ranks among the foremost authors of contemporary American horror.”
— Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence & Other Stories and Occultation
“Dark Awakenings offers the dream imagery of the best weird fiction but goes even further beyond the ordinary thanks to Matt Cardin’s fierce intellect. Haunting stories and insightful essays. This is mandatory reading to prepare for the doom to come.”
— Nick Mamatas, author of Move Under Ground
“In a wonderfully readable, multi-layered collection, Matt Cardin shows us that he knows, as very few do, how to write — from several perspectives, including as a researcher — in a way that is both riveting and richly detailed. Cardin’s gift can be celebrated by all readers.”
— T.M. Wright, author of Strange Seed and A Manhattan Ghost Story