A quick update from Austin and ArmadilloCon 31 (with photos to follow within a couple of days, when I can swipe them from the sites of people who brought a camera): It’s Saturday night — nearing the end of Day 2 of the three-day con — and everything’s going well. Lots of fun and productive…
Tag: horror
Nietzsche: Loving existence even though it’s horrifying and absurd
A review of Keith Ansell Pearson’s How to Read Nietzsche (2005) at The Journal of Nietzsche Studies features the following paragraph, which, with its focus on Nietzsche and its description of a worldview based on tragedy and horror, is a quintessential example of the type of writing that has unfailingly arrested me with a hypnotic…
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…
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…
Nietzsche on the horror of existence
[NOTE: For another post about Nietzsche and horror, see “Nietzsche: Loving existence even though it’s horrifying and absurd.”] Every lover of books can narrate a personal history of his or her encounters with books and authors whose influence proved to be life-changing. For me, the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those…
My interview at Thomas Ligotti Online
It’s no news to my readers — whether they know me from The Teeming Brain, my literary critical work, my published stories, or some combination thereof — that I’m a huge fan of contemporary horror writer Thomas Ligotti, whom I honestly consider to be one of the greatest living writers in the English language (an…
The Frankenstein Economy: Monster metaphor of the moment
[Note added 09/24/08: There is now a sequel post to this one, offering several more examples of the Frankensteinian “monster amok” theme as it’s being used in contemporary economic discourse.] Has anybody else noticed the increasing prevalence of monster metaphors, especially Frankenstein-themed ones, in mainstream public discourse about the mounting economic and financial disaster? I’m…
My interview with Stephen Jones in Cemetery Dance #59
My interview with horror editor/anthologist extraordinaire Stephen Jones has finally been given a definite publication date in the venerable horror industry magazine Cemetery Dance. I first mentioned this interview nearly a year ago, in May of 2007, in a post titled “Stephen Jones on the death of reading” that contained a substantial excerpt detailing Steve’s…
Bernankenstein and the Economonster from Hell (Headlines from the Meltdown)
GENERAL COMMENT FROM CARDIN: Bernankenstein and the Economonster from Hell Okay, so that’s a silly title for this week’s comment. But I still like it. For one thing, I’m hugely fond of the Hammer Horror films from Britain’s Hammer Studios back in the 1950s-1970s. All of their horror series started out strong — the Dracula…
The Daemon is someone inside you
Apologies for my failure yesterday to make my regular Monday blog post. I really have no excuse, especially since I was off work yesterday due to last week’s winter storm that has resulted in several days of school cancellations. Today we’re in our fourth day of this unexpected vacation, with a return to work tomorrow…