Recently, I was interviewed for the excellent Weird Studies podcast. The episode, titled “On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin,” dropped yesterday. You can listen to it with the player above or by clicking through to the site itself. Here’s the episode description: Neil Gaiman wrote, If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are…
Category: Writing & Creativity
This Is Horror, Episode 193: Jon Padgett and Matt Cardin on “Vastarien” and More
In this just-published episode of the This Is Horror Podcast, Jon Padgett and I talk with hosts Michael David Wilson and Bob Pastorella about our new project Vastarien: A Literary Journal, along with other matters of interest. Click to listen or download. Note that at the time of this writing, our Vastarien Kickstarter campaign, to…
My interview for This Is Horror – Part Two
Here’s the second and final part of my recent interview for the This Is Horror podcast. Co-hosts Michael David Wilson and Bob Pastorella conducted the whole thing skillfully, so hats off to them. Readers who have followed the saga of the birth of Horror Literature through History may be especially interested to hear that I…
“Matt Cardin on Horror and Spirituality, Thomas Ligotti, and Alan Watts” – An interview for the This Is Horror podcast
I was recently interviewed by the good folks at This Is Horror for their popular podcast. Here’s the result, published today as the first of two parts. The conversation with TIH mastermind Michael David Wilson and co-host Bob Pastorella turned out to be extremely wide-ranging. We talked about my Horror Literature through History encyclopedia plus…
“Horror Literature through History” an unexpected Amazon bestseller
Much to my surprise, a two-volume encyclopedia priced for institutional purchase by academic and public libraries has become a bestseller at Amazon. I don’t know the actual sales figures, and I’m sure they’re pretty small in terms of absolute numbers, since the book’s category (the history and criticism of horror and supernatural literature) is a…
Revised and Relaunched: MattCardin.com
After several months of deliberation and development, I have just launched a brand new version of my author site, www.mattcardin.com. The layout and structure are completely new, with easy navigation, a modern look, and an overall sleeker design. Have a look and let me know what you think.
On the burning of manuscripts in the digital age
When we talk about burning books or manuscripts, we usually think in terms of a Nazi-like, Fahrenheit 451-ish circumstance of repression and censorship. But there’s a venerable and remarkable tradition of writers burning their own manuscripts, or expressing a desire to burn them, or talking about the value of burning them. Think Kafka (burned most…
The cover design for my ‘Horror Literature through History’ encyclopedia
Last week ABC-CLIO posted a cover design for Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears. This is appropriate timing, since for the past month I’ve been fielding a flood of contributor submissions, and my editorial work on the project is eating up literally all of my extra…
My “Daemonyx” album available on YouTube
A few months ago I discovered that my entire Daemonyx album has been uploaded to YouTube by CD Baby. This is the same album that accompanied my Dark Awakenings collection when people bought it directly from the publisher, Mythos Books. In case you’d like to hear it: The whole thing seems strangely alien to me…
Terri Windling (and Lewis Hyde and Stephen King) on the care and feeding of daemons and muses
Some neat thoughts on inspired creativity drawn from Lewis Hyde and Stephen King, and presented by Terri Windling, whose editorial and authorial contributions to modern fantasy and speculative fiction have been so very valuable: As Hyde explained in his book, The Gift (1983): “The task of setting free one’s gifts was a recognized labor in…