Here’s some new Internet chatter about my recently published stories.
ABOUT “THE NEW PAULINE CORPUS” IN CTHULHU’S REIGN
[The anthology’s premise] leaves the contributors with a fairly broad territory to explore, which they do to greater or lesser effect, and sometimes with stunning originality. . . . Matt Cardin’s “The New Pauline Corpus” plays with that old Lovecraftian standby, the sacred text of cosmic evil, and comes up with something wickedly satirical.
— Richard Dansky, writing for for Green Man Review
Unlike other anthologies, the stories within Cthulhu’s Reign. . . push the boundaries of narration. Thereâs a healthy dose of experimentation with these stories like the one that Matt Cardin wrote entitled “The New Pauline Corpus.” As a result, some of the stories will require a close read, which is something to keep in mind if youâre picking this anthology up.
— Monica Valentinelli, writing for Flames Rising
Many years ago, I came upon an essay written by someone who claimed to be a devout Christian. In his essay, he attempted to answer the age-old questions about why God would allow suffering, pain and all of the other horrible things that we humans experience. God, he wrote, would be considered a sociopath if He were a human. However, He is so far beyond our spectrum of thought and being that what is sociopathic for us is something utterly different to Him. The essay left me certain that its author must only be devout in his faith because he believes God to be a horrible, vastly powerful entity who can be infinitely cruel and itâs better to try to keep Him happy with you. âThe New Pauline Corpusâ by Matt Cardin reminds me of this essay, drawing parallels between the Bible and the Cthulhu mythos.
— Lyndsey Holder, writing for Innsmouth Free Press
ABOUT “CHIMERAS & GROTESQUERIES” IN DARK FAITH
In the eighteenth century, when fiction was first developing as a modern artform and the willing suspension of disbelief was not yet something one could take for granted, authors often coaxed their readers into it by presenting the story as a manuscript which had come into the author’s hands by one means or another. As readers became more accustomed to suspending their disbelief willingly upon being presented with a work of fiction, such narrative apparatus was discarded as unwieldy. It would make its reappearance in some of the earliest science fiction stories, particularly the sword-and-planet stories of John Carter penned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but by the second half of the twentieth century it became a rare device, used primarily to create the sense of a period piece. And that is what Matt Cardin seems to be trying to do in “Chimeras & Grotesqueries,” for all that it is set in a modern city and deals with an artist creating outsider art of a particularly spiritual sort. A man who may be slowly losing his mind, or who may be moving into a sphere of transcendent genius inaccessible to us mere mortals.
— Leigh Kimmel, writing for The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf
[N.B.: I really dig this next one. You’ve gotta love it when somebody calls it like they see it, and does so with flair. – MC]
An evocative, passionate and loving tribute to H. P. Lovecraft — no, wait. Half of an evocative, passionate and loving tribute to Lovecraft. The story of other worldly horrors invading ours wearing the warped and perverted masks of our tiny human religions was just being to envelope and subdue me, when it ended. Maybe Matt stared a little too deeply into the abyss and never got the chance to write the other half.
— Dylan Fox, writing at DylanFox.net
Now I have to go get Dark Faith . . .
It’s really a fine anthology. Stronger than the average one. I think you’ll enjoy it, Noel. My own story, btw, is written in an overwrought style, and it really does end abruptly like Dylan Fox noted — but the fictional preface that accompanies it provides some context for those facts.