The Teeming Brain

I certainly didn’t wake up this morning expecting to find out that Dark Arts, the long-delayed next installment in the series of anthologies sponsored by the Horror Writers Association, had finally been unleashed upon the world. But then Michael Kelly, a friend and fellow horror writer who, like me, has a story in there, sent me an email pointing out that Cemetery Dance, the publisher, is now listing the book as having a publication date of September 2006 — that’s this month, for those of you who are currently suffering a temporal dislocation — and a current status of “in stock.”

So, mirabile dictu, it appears that after five years in purgatory, Dark Arts has finally entered the land of the living. Many thanks to Mike for alerting me to this.

As I mentioned early last month in a previous post, the book has already garnered an extremely postive advance review from Publishers Weekly that speaks quite well of “Nightmares, Imported and Domestic,” the story penned by Mark McLaughlin and myself that rounds out the contents. If you visit the page for the book at Amazon (which still incorrectly lists a March publication date), you’ll see that Booklist is praising it, too. So this bodes well for its critical success. Now if only the book goes on to please the public, sell out quickly, and find publication in a mass market edition, then all will be perfect.

I’m eagerly awaiting my contributor’s copy. If you’re at all acquainted with contemporary horror fiction and some of its most respected authors, then you’ll understand why when you scan the table of contents. I expect this one to make for wonderful reading.

TOC for Dark Arts:

- “The Disease Artist” by Steve Rasnic Tem
- “The Shape of the Empty Heart” by Gerard Houarner
- “For Art’s Sake” by John Pelan
- “With Acknowledgements to Sun Tzu” by Brian Hodge
- “Hurdy Gurdy” by Peadar Ó Guilín
- “The Art of Madness” by Edo van Belkom
- “The Power of Preserving Pictures” by Leah Cutter
- “The Death Technique” by John B. Rosenman
- “Body” by Tim Lebbon
- “The Final Staging of Ascent” by Tom Piccirilli
- “I Hear You Quietly Singing” by Lucy Taylor
- “Learning to Leave the Flesh” by Jeff VanderMeer
- “The Hoplite” by Paul Finch
- “Chained Melody” by Patricia Macomber
- “Works of Art” by J.F.Gonzalez
- “The Disinterment of Ophelia” by Michelle Scalise
- “If You Were Glass…” by David Niall Wilson
- “A Splash of Color” by Michael Oliveri
- “The Mist Machine” by Charlee Jacob
- “Scratching the Surface” by Michael Kelly
- “Kodachrome” by Lorelei Shannon
- “Nightmares, Imported And Domestic” by Mark McLaughlin and Matt Cardin

Two days ago, on a Saturday evening, as I was driving through Springfield, Missouri on the way home from my grandfather’s 89th birthday party, I decided to stop at the local Barnes & Noble to see if they had any copies of Alone on the Darkside, the recently-released anthology that features my novelette “Desert Places.” I hadn’t (and still haven’t) received my contributor’s copy, so I was eager to get a look at the finished product.

And lo! B & N did have a stack of them, right there in the middle of the main aisle on a table full of Halloween-themed books. The cover art was beautiful. The overall production values were excellent, as should be expected for a mass market paperback from Roc, a division of Penguin. I opened the book, scanned the table of contents, and quickly flipped to the first page of my story. . .

. . . where I was mildly mortified to find that, due to some sort of unexpected error, one of the opening epigraphs that I had intended to accompany the story had been omitted. The only epigraph that appears there in the published version is a famous quote from H.P. Lovecraft’s classic essay Supernatural Horror in Literature: “Men with minds sensitive to heriditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars.” Sitting there alone on the page without any other quotations to qualify or contradict it, the Lovecraft line of course implies that the story to follow will have something to do with cosmic or extra-cosmic terrors of an archetypally Lovecraftian sort.

But in point of fact, that’s not at all what the story is about. Or rather, it broaches or lightly references horrors of a cosmic type, but then turns its attentions away from these and toward those of a more intimate and earthy type. Which is why I meant for the Lovecraft quote to be followed by one from Robert Frost, from his poem “Desert Places“:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

It was the contrast between the two quotes, the first touching upon fears of a cosmic-horrific cast, the second upon fears of a more intimate, immediate type that involves inner barrenness, that I was seeking to evoke. And of course the Frost poem is also the source of my story’s title, which in the published version, sans Frost, remains unexplained.

But in the end, what can one do other than to give a resigned, “Oh, well”? It’s a minor matter, especially in comparison to the various lumps in my prose style, cadence, and word choice that made me wince when I noticed them during a quick scan-through of the story.

On a happier note, I told the folks at the customer service desk that I was one of the authors in the book and asked them if they thought my signature would help to sell any books. They responded with a fairly enthusiastic “Yes,” so I scribbled my name in their half-dozen copies. Now if only the people who end up buying those copies will be so caught up in the joy of owning my autograph that they’ll fail to notice my lumpy writing and the lack of an explanation for the story’s title, then all will be well.

To begin with, a proviso: I probably don’t know what I’m talking about here. I’m certainly not a political scientist. I may not even qualify as a reasonably informed citizen. But anyway…

A little over a week ago, back on September 10th, the online arm of The Guardian published a long essay by Martin Amis titled “The Age of Horrorism,” about the rise of radical Islam and what Amis views as the West’s pathetically inadequate response to it. As the abstract at the start of the article puts it, “On the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, one of Britain’s most celebrated and original writers analyses — and abhors — the rise of extreme Islamism. In a penetrating and wide-ranging essay he offers a trenchant critique of the grotesque creed and questions the West’s faltering response to this eruption of evil.” The essay is a fascinating read, and one which I heartily recommend. But only if you’re prepared to be bothered.

What’s really troubling and fascinating me at the moment is Amis’s explanation and analysis of the way the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb attended American universities in the 1940s and 1950s and then returned to his home country, where he laid the foundation for radical Islam’s guiding anti-Western ideology. I don’t mean I’m troubled by the way Amis presents Qutb’s story. I mean I’m troubled by the story itself. Qutb’s status as the intellectual father of Islamic extremism is hardly a secret in the West. Many of us Westerners have already learned of it through various means, such as an in-depth NPR story that appeared three years ago. I myself have brushed past Qutb’s story a time or two in my journeys through media culture. But I learned more about it from Amis’s essay that I had previously known, and it really got me to thinking.

In particular, I’m troubled by the fact that Qutb’s famous cultural criticisms of America and the West illustrate one of the great difficulties facing anybody who tries to confront radical Islam, namely, that many of these criticisms are built around a valid core insight. Inspired by Qutb’s voluminous writings, radical Islamists harp on America’s relative soullessness, its insanely idiotic pop culture, its overall cultural shallowness, its general degradation and decline under the influence of capitalism, celebrity worship, egoism, and the like. In so doing, they are singling out some of the very same things that many of our best homegrown culture critics — e.g., Daniel Boorstin, Neil Postman, Allan Bloom, Theodore Roszak, James Howard Kunstler, Morris Berman, Benjamin Barber, Lewis Mumford, C.S. Lewis — have gone on about for decades. Certainly, the Islamists take their criticisms to sometimes comical (or tragic) extremes. Their views are shot through with a virulent misogyny and what seems a positively pathological fear or hatred of sex and the human body. Equally as important, they frequently misread, misrepresent, or flat out misunderstand American history, as Amis trenchantly points out. But even so, it’s difficult to avoid concluding that in their moral horror at what the West has become under the economic, political, and military leadership of America, the Islamists are nursing a fundamentally sound grievance.

The dangers that stem from this are severe. In such a situation, it’s all too easy for many people to condemn or dismiss valid criticisms of America and the West because such criticisms sound suspiciously like something a radical Islamist would say. Allowed to run to its full extreme, this suppression of self-reflection would almost certainly lead us into culture death in the form of a dystopian society like the ones described in Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World. On the other hand, it’s also possible to focus too much on the little bit that the Islamists have gotten right, and to let this arouse sympathy for them, and thus to lose sight of the fact that many of them really are hellbent on destroying and/or forcefully converting the West, and that they really do represent a danger so grave as to border on the apocalyptic. The likely outcome of this second approach is equally easy to forecast.

Amidst this confusion and difficulty, I continue to think that Benjamin Barber’s characterization of the clash of civilizations as Jihad vs. McWorld, i.e., tribalism vs. globalism, is the single most helpful expression and analysis of where we now stand, since it presents a forceful criticism of both sides of the conflict, and explains how both tendencies are hostile toward authentic democratic civilization. The opening paragraphs of his famous 1992 essay for The Atlantic summarize the matter perfectly, and seem positively prophetic in light of events that have unfolded over the past decade:

“Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures — both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe — a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food — with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald’s, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.

….”The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad’s centrifugal whirlwind against McWorld’s centripetal black hole, the outcome is unlikely to be democratic.”

It has come about that I’m going to be interviewed sometime soon by Heathen Harvest, an online magazine whose tagline says it all: “Illuminating the post-industrial underground.”  They feature news, reviews, concert reports, and interviews with such bands as Coil, Sol Invictus, and many others of the same ilk.  One of the editors contacted me to request the interview after discovering my musical project Daemonyx through its MySpace page.  I will of course provide a link here when the interview is published.

This morning during the drive in to work, I happened to catch sight of a particularly evocative church sign. Surely you’re aware of the church sign phenomenon that has become a pervasive part of American folk culture over the past couple of decades. It’s now standard practice for many thousands of churches, especially small rural ones, to take the signs in front of their buildings that formerly displayed only the hours of their services and the names of their pastors, and use them to display cutesy little sayings with a corny/kitschy religious edge. The result is that nowadays you can be fairly certain if you drive through any middle American town with its dozens of Protestant churches, you’ll be greeted with roadside messages like, “Eternity — smoking or non-smoking?” and “Seven days without prayer makes one weak.” You’ll be asked, “Need a new look?” and then advised, “Come inside for a faith lift!” And you’ll be told that daily Bible reading helps prevent “Truth Decay.”

This morning as I was driving past a little church that sits right on the edge of the city limits in the town where I teach, I noticed the message it currently has displayed on its sign: “Keep your eyes on the skies! Jesus is coming!” And for no good reason, I thought immediately of the ominous warning, so familiar from classic science fiction films, for us all to “Watch the skies!” This is the final line of dialogue spoken in the 1951 version of The Thing, as a journalist files a radio report intended to warn earth’s population of the danger facing it from space. “Watch the Skies” was the working title for director Steven Spielberg’s classic alien invasion film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). So this morning when I read that church sign, I was suddenly catapulted into a heady vision of Jesus Christ as an alien monster against whom we should be on our collective guard.

And then I remembered a picture my little six-year-old niece had showed me just two days ago. She’s a cherubic child who came within a hair’s breadth of being used by Wal-Mart for child modeling purposes, but if the artwork she produces is any indication, then her imagination is apparently a little darker than her appearance would indicate. We were at her grandparents’ house for the regular Sunday lunch with the in-laws, and my niece came up to show me a picture she had drawn that very morning. It depicted a crayon-rendered Jesus hanging on a cross. I asked her what the red stuff on the wood was, and she replied cheerily, “Blood.” Then she pointed to a blobular yellow-orange shape located directly below Jesus. She had drawn it with elongated nodules stretching out on either side of Jesus to surround him, and she explained, “It’s a monster.” I asked her, “A monster is eating Jesus?” She smiled and said yes, the monster was eating Jesus so that Jesus would be all safe and sound inside it.

Now, I don’t know the origin of this stunningly wonderful example of childhood mental juxtaposition. I think maybe a logical explanation would be that she must have recently been taught the story of Jonah and the Whale (which was actually a big fish, as we Bible scholars are always proud to point out) and then gotten it mentally bound up with images of the felt-board Jesus she sees in Sunday School. But whatever the reason, she is my beloved niece, with whom I am well pleased.

So remember: Keep watching the skies! Jesus is coming and we’ve got to be on our guard! Train the telescopes and radar dishes heavenward! Prepare the nuclear arsenal! Remain vigilant! And pray fervently that when that great and terrible day finally arrives, when Jesus comes shooting through the clouds in a flying saucer with death rays trained upon Washington, D.C., the yellow-orange blob monster will rise up to save us.

A good friend and fellow grumpy teacher — who, incidentally, maintains a blog titled Grumpy Teacher — tagged me last month for the propagation of a questionnaire about books. I’m only just now getting around to fulfilling this sacred obligation. Apologies for the delay, GT!

Please note at the outset that I altered the first item on the list by making it refer to three books instead of one. This is cheating and I know it.

1. Three books that changed my life: The Dunwich Horror and Others, by H.P. Lovecraft; The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts; Grimscribe, by Thomas Ligotti
2. One book I’ve read more than once: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (currently 15 times with another three looming ahead)
3. One book I’d want on a desert island: The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle (or his A New Earth, which is equally brilliant and wonderful)
4. One book that made me laugh: Bored of the Rings, by the Harvard Lampoon
5. One book that made me cry: A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L’Engle
6. One book I wish had been written: Nighttown, by T.E.D. Klein (the long delayed and probably never-to-be-seen followup to 1984’s The Ceremonies)
7. One book I wish had never been written: Even when I hate a book, I don’t wish it unwritten.
8. One book I’m currently reading: Whispers (the first volume in the classic horror anthology series), edited by Stuart David Schiff
9. One book I’ve been meaning to read: Technopoly, by Neil Postman
10. One book I’d like to write: A metafictional novel that combines equal parts spiritual enlightenment and cosmic/ontological horror, with the end result being a book that breaches the barrier between literary and existential reality, and which therefore ends up transforming the reader on a profound cognitive/emotional/spiritual level. Oh, wait, we already have a near equivalent of this in Tom Ligotti’s omnibus collection The Nightmare Factory.

I’ll tag Stu Young and Monsieur Crankypants to perpetuate this meme, if they’re so inclined.

Two or three months ago I created a couple of MySpace accounts. One of them is intended to give a visible face to my musical project Daemonyx. Its address is www.myspace.com/daemonyx. Obviously, if you’ve been reading my posts here at The Teeming Brain then you’re already aware of this one’s existence, since it’s the page where I’ve directed people for purposes of winning prizes by listening to Daemonyx’s music. Just a couple of days ago I beefed up the page with all of the blurbs Daemonyx has received to date from prominent figures in the horror and fantasy communities. Several of these will be familiar to readers of The Teeming Brain, since I posted them here awhile back, but one of them — a super quote from Brian Hodge, before whom I bow in awe for both his literary and musical productions — is brand new. So head on over there if you want to check it out. Also remember that from time to time I’ll be rotating the songs that are available in the music player.

The other MySpace account I created over the summer is a personal one. That is, I created it for my Matt Cardin persona. (And does that sound at all whacked out to refer to my regular identity as a “persona”? If so, then you haven’t been studying your Jung.) I believe this is the first time I’ve mentioned it here. You’ll find it at www.myspace.com/mattcardin. It features a bit of information about me and my writing, along with some cover images from some of the books in which my work has been or will soon be published. It also features a collection of some of the best blurbs and reviews I’ve received for my writing, from the likes of Thomas Ligotti, Brian McNaughton, John Pelan, Cemetery Dance, and several others. So I encourage you to visit it.

Permanent links for both MySpace pages can be found on the sidebar here at The Teeming Brain, under the heading “pages I visit.”

On a related note, just last Sunday I read an AP news story about MySpace’s plan to beef up their services for bands and musicians by allowing artists to sell mp3 downloads through the site. I had really been wondering about doing something like this anyway with Daemonyx’s music, since I’ve been reading up for several months on the revolutionary music sales model created by the fine folks at Magnatune and have been thinking that it sounds like a brilliant way to go. So I may well avail myself of this when it becomes a reality. And of course I’ll let you know about it here at my blog.

Finally, I’ve been thinking of offering mp3 discs for sale. As in, right now, several months before Daemonyx’s debut album Curse of the Daimon will become a reality. I’ve been thinking I might charge $3.00 plus postage (at the cheap Media Mail rate) for an mp3 disc containing my home-mastered mixes of most or all of the songs that will be featured on the album. I would then count those $3.00 towards the purchase of the official album itself, which will of course be professionally mastered, and which will feature cover art by Jason Van Hollander and extensive liner notes by yours truly. Would this interest any of you? Maybe in a collectors’ kind of way? Not only the mastering but also some of the mixing on the mp3 disc will differ from what will eventually be released on the final version. And maybe I’ll throw in another bonus as well, perhaps an excerpt from my currently unpublished personal journal There Is No Grand Scheme (portions of which appear in the 2006 anthology In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing). If you’re at all interested in acquiring such a disc, please let me know either by commenting on this post or emailing me at mgcardin@hughes.net, so that I can know whether it’s worth the effort of working out the details.

I’ve just posted an interview with British horror writer Mark Samuels that I conducted over the past couple of weeks. Mark gave some fascinating responses to my questions, and I’m proud to be one of the only people he’s consented to have interview him. If you’re at all interested in horror fiction, or religion, or H.P. Lovecraft, or Arthur Machen, or genre and literary theory, or the contemporary Western political and social situation, or a great many other subjects, then you’ll really be interested in what Mark has to say.

You can access the interview here or from the link on the sidebar under “pages.”

So all of a sudden I’m not just a writer but an editor as well. And it began with an online discussion.

Over at the Shocklines message boards a month or two ago, an excited discussion ensued when horror writer Randy Chandler suggested that somebody should edit an anthology titled “Holy Horrors.” He had come across this term in a book about the American Civil War and had found it wonderfully evocative. One thing led to another, and now these several weeks later it has come about that I am involved in co-editing that very anthology. My fellow editor in the project — and the man who, in the wake of Randy’s suggestion, really got the whole thing off the ground — is best-selling horror writer T.M. Wright. If by some strange miracle you’re unfamiliar with his name, just click the link just given — or this one for a list of his published books, complete with cover images — and be aware that you have almost certainly encountered his work if you’ve entered any bookstore in the past three decades.

As the title Holy Horrors would indicate, the book Terry and I are putting together is an anthology of religious horror stories. Or it might be just as accurate to call them horrific religious stories. In other words, they’re horror stories that somehow involve, revolve around, emerge from, dwell upon, find their horror within, or otherwise deal with the issue of religion, religiosity, and/or spirituality as a central theme. I’m psyched to be at the helm of such a project, as will be easily understandable to anybody who has read my fiction or essays or followed this blog. The interaction between religion and horror is one of my central concerns.

I will be writing an introduction for the anthology that will explore the history and meaning of religious horror and horrific religion. The point will be to illuminate the historical and artistic context behind the stories in the book. Terry and I will each be contributing all-new stories as well. We already have what looks like a stellar lineup of authors taking shape. As I write these words, the antho is still looking for a definite home with a publisher, but there are positive indications that it will land quite well.

Terry shouldered the task of writing the submission guidelines and predictably ended up making them quite fun and engaging in their own right. If you’re the type of person who scours writing markets, then you’ll probably see the Holy Horrors guidelines appearing all over the place in the next few months. Presently they’re live at Shocklines. In the interest of furthering the cause, I’ve decided to publish them here at The Teeming Brain as well. Just click below:

Submission Guidelines for Holy Horrors

If you’re an interested writer who prefers the Reader’s Digest version, here are the basic facts:

• Wanted: Horror stories that feature religion as a central theme
• Submission deadline: February 2007
• Projected publication date: autumn 2007
• Length: 5000 words max (not firm, but reasonably so)
• Reprints accepted? Yes
• Payment: 5 cents per words for unpublished stories, 2.5 cents per word for reprints. Half paid upon acceptance and half upon publication.

But again, I really urge you to read the complete guidelines.