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….
Tag: horror
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,…
WHAT THE DAEMON SAID: Cover, TOC, and Publication Date
Today I received word from Hippocampus Press that my nonfiction collection What the Daemon Said: Essays on Weird Fiction, Film, and Philosophy is scheduled for publication on April 26. Preorders are available now. The beautiful cover is by Dan Sauer. Click to order. BLURBS: “For my money, Matt Cardin is the most interesting voice in…
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…
The Best Thomas Ligotti Story You’ve (Probably) Never Read
Thomas Ligotti’s “Ghost Stories for the Dead” first appeared in 1982 in the second issue of the small press horror magazine Grimoire. It opened with an epigraph drawn from E. M. Cioran: “That faint light in each of us which dates back before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if…
Horror Movies, Transcendence, and a Symbiosis between the Demonic and the Divine
Here’s Will H. Rockett, in his book Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty, saying things that affected and influenced me deeply in the 1990s when I was first divining the nexus of responsiveness that I had recognized within myself to intimations of religious transcendence both divine and demonic, beatific and horrifying,…
A World Edged with a Baseless Terror: The Lessons of School Educational Videos
Joel Golby on the surreal horror of the educational films and videos that many of us grew up with: [A] calm voice tells you of the mysteries of the ocean; a man with an ungroomed beard stands emotionlessly in front of some cream-colored industrial machinery; an incredibly lo-fi, three-cel animation tells you how frogs are…
PseudoPod production of my story “Teeth” (Part 1)
PseudoPod 721: Teeth – Part 1 PseudoPod has just published the first part of a two-part reading of my story “Teeth” (linked above). More than 20 years ago, this was my first published story, and now it has become my first story to be produced for an audio presentation. In what amounts to a two-decade…
Quantum physics, cultural madness, and the Azathoth paradigm
Apparently, working from home during the current disruption and suspension of all normal activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic is leaving me too much time and mental space for reflection. Please pardon me while I ill-advisedly correlate some contents and piece together some dissociated knowledge. Bernardo Kastrup in Scientific American: [A]s Kuhn pointed out, when…