This is the first of a three-part series. (Also see parts 2 and 3.)In this post I’ll simply point to the problem and refer to a couple of recently published pieces that lay it out in bleak detail. In the next two, to be published over the course of this week, I’ll lay out some…
Author: Matt Cardin
Teeming Brain founder and editor Matt Cardin is the author of DARK AWAKENINGS, DIVINATIONS OF THE DEEP, A COURSE IN DEMONIC CREATIVITY: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO THE INNER GENIUS, and TO ROUSE LEVIATHAN. He is also the editor of BORN TO FEAR: INTERVIEWS WITH THOMAS LIGOTTI and the academic encyclopedias MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD; GHOSTS, SPIRITS, AND PSYCHICS: THE PARANORMAL FROM ALCHEMY TO ZOMBIES; and HORROR LITERATURE THROUGH HISTORY.
Choose now: a “depopulation explosion” or a doubling of earth’s population by 2040
There’s a very worthy front-page story in today’s Washington Post (“Simplicity Becomes a Selling Point“) about the current scramble among mass-produced food companies to slant their advertising campaigns to cater to the swelling public desire for greater simplicity and “naturalness” in food products, and also the desire for more locally produced foods. Near the end…
DARK AWAKENINGS: Signed, sealed, and delivered at last
Yesterday around 2 a.m. I hit the “send” button to email the completed manuscript of my forthcoming collection of horror stories and essays, Dark Awakenings, to its publisher, Mythos Books. This was a long time coming. People who liked my first book, Divinations of the Deep, have been asking me ever since its publication in…
Thomas Friedman: The game is up, the ‘Great Disruption’ is at hand
Who would have believed it? Two days ago in Saturday’s (March 7) edition of The New York Times, Mr. Economic Globalization himself — Thomas Friedman, author of the monumentally influential tome The World Is Flat, which argues that individuals and nations must recognize and adapt to the reality of a level global economic “playing field”…
The Onion: Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added to the Curriculum
For Lovecraft fanatics like me, a piece that appears in the current issue of The Onion (March 2, 2009, Issue 45:10) is surely the most hilarious bit of writing to come down the pipeline in years. Its title is “Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added to the Curriculum.” For obvious (copyright-related) reasons, I can’t…
Troubles in Eastern Europe add to drumbeat of economic Armageddon
My roving eye-for-apocalypse scans the immediate environment and detects — imminent meltdown in Eastern Europe! In a word (or actually two), holy hell. The financial situation in Eastern Europe has gotten absolutely insane over the past few days. Here’s a small sampling of the mass-mediated intel that’s available to us mere mortals — as distinguished…
Economic doom indeed: Fantasy, SF, and horror publishers and publications scaling back and shutting down
Okay, so this developing trend doesn’t rank up there in severity with things like peak oil, spiking unemployment, riots around the globe, and dead bees. But it’s still quite interesting, at least to somebody like me, who has written horror for years, spoken on panels at several genre conventions, and made a lot of personal…
Apocalypse-check, January 2009: Yep, the sky’s falling
It’s the end of the first month of 2009. The apocalypse, or at least the human race’s version based on hubris and greed, began in earnest last year. So how’s it looking now, 31 days into the new year? A sampling of prominent headlines will sketch the picture: America’s economy is worse than it looks,…
Citizens stage mass strike and demonstration across France (with riot in Paris) over government bail outs of banks while U.S. citizens remain asleep in their La-Z Boys
Check out this BBC video from yesterday (Thursday, January 29): Crowds riot in striking France [Whoever posted the video to YouTube requested to have external embedding disabled, so you’ll have to click on the link and actually visit YouTube to watch it.] The summary and upshot: All across France yesterday, citizens staged a HUGE strike…
Bad Titles for Horror Movies
For those who like their humor absurd with a dash of lame, here’s a list of 25-plus-one really awful titles (and ideas) for horror movies. The inspiration for this rather useless expenditure of mental activity goes back to a conversation I had with my friend and fellow horror writer Mark McLaughlin in 2001, when he…