The Teeming Brain

A heads up for those of you who, like me, enjoy reading about paranormal things:  Last week my review of the new book Unexplained: An Encyclopedia of Curious Phenomena, Strange Superstitions, and Ancient Mysteries was published at the excellent online speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons.  The short version: I love it!  For more detail and nuance, see the complete review.

A special thanks goes out to Andrew, who pointed out that I should have apprised my Teeming Brain readers of this.

What an interesting cultural moment it is for somebody like me, who holds an obsessive interest in religion, horror, and the interface between them.

For example, it’s widely recognized that zombies have become the monsters of the moment in contemporary horror entertainment. Zombie-themed movies have been flooding movie theatres for the past five or six years, ranging in quality from the low (e.g., 2003’s House of the Dead, based on the popular video game) to the middling (e.g., other video game adaptations such as 2005’s Doom and 2002’s Resident Evil) to the high (e.g., 2002’s 28 Days Later, directed by indie fave Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame). Last year, legendary film director George Romero’s Land of the Dead, the long-awaited fourth installment in his classic Living Dead series, finally arrived in theatres after a wait of 20 years. Zombie-themed novels are filling bookstore shelves at a staggering pace, such as Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead, Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, and many, many more. Sequels to many of the newer zombie movies have already happened (2004’s Resident Evil: Apocalypse) or are on the way (28 Weeks Later, scheduled for 2007).

This whole phenomenon absolutely fascinates me, since zombies are positively ripe (no pun intended) with the kind of religious-horrific crossover significance that I’m always looking for. I’ve been an avid student of the zombie subgenre for a great many years now. Romero’s movies blew me away when I was in my teens, during which period I also discovered the zombie films of Lucio Fulci and others. Years later, when I got into graduate school my religious studies professors generously allowed me to explore my horror-oriented interests within the confines of their discipline, and I turned to the zombie theme for one of the two seminar papers I wrote in completion of my M.A. The title was “Loathsome Objects: George Romero’s Living Dead Films as Contemplative Tools.” My thesis was that the rich trove of apocalyptic religious elements presented in Romero’s zombie movies (which at the time, ca. 2003, formed a trilogy instead of today’s quadrilogy), acting in tandem with their through-the-roof presentation of explicit violence and gore, renders them amenable to a contemplative reading in which they serve as spurs to an experience of spiritual transcendence, somewhat along the line of the famous — or obscure, or notorious (take your pick) — practice of meditating on rotten corpses that has been recommended by some historical Buddhist sects in the interest of awakening the meditator to a vivid recognition of the truth of impermanence and the reality of personal emptiness.

So in light of all that, you can imagine how interested I was to learn recently of the publication of a new book titled Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, written by religious studies professor Kim Paffenroth and published by Baylor University Press. The publisher’s description reads as follows: “This volume connects American social and religious views with the classic American movie genre of the zombie horror film. For nearly forty years, the films of George A. Romero have presented viewers with hellish visions of our world overrun by flesh-eating ghouls. This study proves that Romero’s films, like apocalyptic literature or Dante’s Commedia, go beyond the surface experience of repulsion to probe deeper questions of human nature and purpose, often giving a chilling and darkly humorous critique of modern, secular America.”

Hello! This is precisely the sort of thing that makes me sit up and take notice. A little judicious poking around online reveals that the book is achieving considerable notoriety. Reviews abound all over the web. Recommendations for the Bram Stoker Award are piling up. And in the course of scoping it out, I’ve stumbled across a number of other recent, pertinent events and items in the same vein, such as a paper by Paul Teusner, written in completion of a Master of Theology degree, titled “Resident Evil: Horror Film and the Construction of Religious Identity in Contemporary Media Culture.” Certainly, scholarly studies that offer a combined focus on religion, horror, and pop culture aren’t new; consider Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King (1996) by Edward J. Ingebretsen, S.J., or Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty (198 by Will Rockett, to name just two worthy examples. But it seems to me that the new trend in such scholarship is to include items, and even to focus upon them centrally, that were formerly considered to be nothing more than pop cultural detritus. Yes, in larger scope this is probably an aspect of the same trend that has led many academic and cultural watchdogs in recent decades to lament the devolution of academic scholarship proper into a kind of degraded freakshow that operates under the influence of a kind of post-modernist frenzied urge to smash the ivory towers and swamp taste and high culture in a sea of trash. But it’s also possible to view this trend, or at least certain aspects of it, in terms of “scholarship on the ground,” as it were: scholarship that seeks to get at the heart of what really makes a culture tick, in terms of the concrete lived experience of being a participant in it.

When I turn my attention in this direction, significant seeming factors begin to pile up faster than I can note them. For example, my friend Maurice Broaddus is pastor, or rather “facilitator,” of a large urban church. He is also a published horror writer who is very aware of the interesting interactions between these facets of his life. Brian Keene, the aforementioned author of several best-selling zombie novels, spoke about his personal religious journey at an event held earlier this year at Maurice’s church in Indianapolis. Turning from literary matters to cinematic ones, Scott Derrickson has become a prominent Christian director of horror films in Hollywood. His resume includes Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), and, as I myself reported on this blog a few months ago, a forthcoming adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. As with Maurice, Brian, and others who are working this very interesting patch of earth, Derrickson is very self-aware of the interplay between his twin foci on religion and artistic horror, as witnessed by the reflective things he has said in various interviews.

The upshot of all my scattered comments and observations here is this: I’m thinking that the conjunction of religion and horror — with the second understood as both an existential experience and an important subset of media/popular culture studies — is an Idea Whose Time Has Come. I have been personally interested in it since earliest childhood and adolescence. I devoted eight years of graduate study to pursuing it along various lines. Currently I’m co-editing an anthology of horror stories to be titled Holy Horrors. So I’m certainly doing my part to turn the earth, and it’s quite gratifying to see the subject rapidly becoming a major focus of attention in the present academic and cultural climate. Gratifying enough, it seems, for me to devote a rambling blog post to it.

Not incidentally, I’m happy to report that I’ve talked with Kim Paffenroth, and he has secured a review copy of Gospel of the Living Dead to send my way. So I’ll definitely be writing more about this book when I’ve had a chance to read it. And I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes open for more evidence of what promises to be a long-lived trend — this widespread academic and cultural focus on religion and horror in tandem — that is only just beginning to blossom.

If you’ve submitted or are thinking of submitting a story to the Holy Horrors anthology that T.M. Wright and I are currently editing, then be advised that I’ve just made a couple of necessary revisions to the guidelines. We were so swamped by the explosive early arrival of a great many stories — regarding which, it’s certainly nice to see such an enthusiastic response from the writing community — that we’re still trying to dig our way out from under the accumulated mountain of manuscripts, which presently continues to grow at a rate of several stories per day.

The revisions to the guidelines reflect a longer response time from us. They also clarify when payment will be made for accepted stories.

FYI, although I can’t name names, I can tell you that the lineup of authors and stories that’s taking shape in Holy Horrors is simply fabulous. It’s already apparent that this will be a truly special anthology. So T.M. and I have just two things to say to all of the interested writers out there: First, send us only your very, very, very best stuff, since the quality bar has already been set EXTREMELY high.  Second: Keep ‘em coming!

As I had previously announced here, I was the subject of an author chat last Monday, November the 13th, at The Lost and the Damned. It went pretty well, I think. I certainly enjoyed myself, and a small crowd showed up to pick my brain about topics that proved quite interesting to me. I just hope my answers proved equally interesting to them.

A full transcript of the chat is now available at the site, and I thought I’d excerpt a portion here in which a couple of questions elicited from me some thoughts that have been playing on my mind a lot recently. For years I’ve been positively fascinated by issues relating to the creative process and the nature and origin of art. Having suffered through several years of a really agonizing creative block — which, ironically, felt supernally peaceful when I allowed myself to relax into it (and the sense of quasi-enlightenment was confirmed after a fashion by the palpably increased clarity of the Buddhist books I read during that period) — having suffered, I say, though such a thing, I’ve been drawn to devote considerable attention to what’s going on inside a person’s psyche when the creative waterworks are shut down (or are in motion, for that matter). Portions of last week’s chat dwelt on things like this, so I reprint them here on the chance that you might find the issue as interesting as I do.

M - What made you decide to start your blog, The Teeming Brain?

Matt Cardin - I was at the end of a period of savage writer’s block that started in late 2001 and early 2002, right when I was correcting the galleys for my Divinations of the Deep collection. I still don’t know for sure why my psyche retracted so violently. But I pretty much went mute, except for quite a lot of private journal writing, for several years. In truth, it felt last summer like I had gotten so sick of my own sickness, my own muteness, that I just wanted to create a public place to vent, to assert my ego. So far it’s going well. It seems to have unlocked the word mill within me. And this also was bound up with my return to composing music a couple of years ago.

L - I was going to ask what started or precipitated the block….I think most writers go through phases like this…since you answered, Matt…you might want to comment on another aspect or getting out of it or whatever…

Matt Cardin - The topic itself fascinates me. I have a long shelf full of books on writing, and the parts on creative block are well-worn. I think my own block might have had something to do with my wife’s precipitous descent into terrible illness, which had started in the late 1990s. I entered a depression I didn’t realize was active. So that had something to do with it. Plus — and this feels stupid to say, but I’ve returned to the thought — I think the deep shock of 9/11 may have had something to do with it. On that day, I had been thinking a lot about my current writing projects, and that shattering sense of realizing that my little world of creative endeavor might not really amount to crap in the face of such events kind of marked me.

[snip]

L- [Would you] comment about the similarities and differences between composing and writing?

Matt Cardin - I find that writing words and composing music use different aspects of the personality or self, but the creative act itself is very similar, in that the best approach, the one for really producing art, is never to try actively to achieve this or that effect. As in, you hear a bit of real-life dialogue, or witness an incident, or encounter a beautiful scene, and think, “I’m going to write a story about that (or a song)!” I’ve been dwelling a lot lately on the fact that the best approach is to develop an inner watchfulness for the things that really inspire you, for the fiery thread of your passion, and to let those outside influences and ideas — many of which may validly be good material — come to you through that inner conduit, after they’ve been thoroughly appropriated by your subconscious mind, your “secret self.”

[snip]

L- You mentioned that sometimes in the actual “execution” of the work you find that you’re not actually writing what you had in mind…how do you handle that? how do you “listen” to your inner voice to change it so that it works so well?

Matt Cardin - I’ve written myself into a blind alley or two by not listening attentively enough to my inner voice. I work almost entirely on intuition and gut instinct when I’m writing fiction. I try to follow the swell of my passion, of the initial impulse that made me want to write to begin with, and I try to pay attention to the feeling that may occur when I’ve gotten off course. I find Stephen King’s analogy of writing as an archaeological project, in which you try your best to uncover a shape in your psyche without damaging it, to be marvelously accurate. So I always feel that a given story idea, or even a nonfiction idea like an essay, comes with a kind of genetic blueprint that reveals itself only in the actual execution, in the actual writing, and I just use my gut to feel out that shape.

First, my standard proviso: If you haven’t already read the first installment in this series of posts, then please do so before reading this one, since the first one lays the groundwork for what I’m going on about.

I assume Poe needs no introduction to most readers, seeing as he — or at least a caricature of him: the alcoholic, opium-addled pedophile who wrote a few bizarre horror tales and a weird poem about a raven — has been a staple of high school literature classes for a very long time now. It still shocks me when I discover literature anthologies dated from only a very few years ago which, in their biographical sketches of Poe, perpetuate the smear campaign that was engineered against him after his death by editor Rufus Griswold and Poe’s mother-in-law, Maria Clemm.

But that’s tangential. As many people know, Poe was a brilliant literary critic in addition to being a poet and fiction writer of genius. He was particularly interested in the ways that various forms of literature achieve their peculiar effects, and in this regard he wrote a couple of passages in his fine essay, “The Poetic Principle,” that touch on the subject of this ethereal longing that interests me so deeply. The essay’s purpose is to identify as nearly as possible the essence of poetry, that is, the principle that motivates poets to write and infuses words with that veritably alchemical ability to affect the reader. Poe ultimately identifies this principle as “simply the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty,” and says its “manifestation. . . is always found in an elevating excitement of the soul, quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the Heart, or of that truth which is the satisfaction of the Reason.” So obviously he’s talking about something sui generis, something that falls into a special category all its own.

In elaborating his ideas about the appeal of the Beautiful — note its elevation to iconic status via the capital “B” — he writes a couple of passages that focus directly on what I am here calling the autumn longing or sehnsucht. As you’ll see if you’ve read my earlier posts in this series, what Poe says interfaces wonderfully with the words of C.S. Lewis and H.P. Lovecraft, the latter of whom, perhaps not incidentally, once called Poe his “god of fiction” and remained a lifelong devotee of this fellow resident of Providence. In the first of these passages I’m quoting, Poe pursues the idea of the “sense of the Beautiful” and, like Lewis and Lovecraft, opines that beauty itself generates the impression of a supernal, transcendent reality lying behind the concrete forms that we call beautiful — the Platonic Form of the Beautiful, we might suppose. In the second passage he lists some of the things “which induce in the Poet himself the true poetical effect.” Although I do not personally, in my own affective experience, follow him when he turns in typical Poe-ish fashion to dwelling upon the supernal “beauty of woman” (not because I don’t find women beautiful, but because I’ve never encountered this particular longing in that connection), I do find it most fascinating that the first half of his catalog mentions many poignant natural beauties that echo similar items listed in Lovecraft’s letters.

* * * * *

“An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors and sentiments amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments a duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and colors, and sentiments which greet him in common with all mankind — he, I say, has yet faded to prove his divine title. There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements perhaps appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not as the Abbate Gravina supposes, through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

“The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness — this struggle, on the part of souls fittingly constituted–has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic.”

* * * * *

“We shall reach, however, more immediately a distinct conception of what the true Poetry is, by mere reference to a few of the simple elements which induce in the Poet himself the true poetical effect. He recognises the ambrosia which nourishes his soul in the bright orbs that shine in Heaven–in the volutes of the flower — in the clustering of low shrubberies — in the waving of the grain-fields — in the slanting of tall eastern trees — in the blue distance of mountains — in the grouping of clouds — in the twinkling of half-hidden brooks — in the gleaming of silver rivers — in the repose of sequestered lakes — in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He perceives it in the songs of birds — in the harp of Aeolus — in the sighing of the night-wind — in the repining voice of the forest — in the surf that complains to the shore — in the fresh breath of the woods — in the scent of the violet — in the voluptuous perfume of the hyacinth — in the suggestive odour that comes to him at eventide from far-distant undiscovered islands, over dim oceans, illimitable and unexplored. He owns it in all noble thoughts — in all unworldly motives — in all holy impulses — in all chivalrous, generous, and self-sacrificing deeds. He feels it in the beauty of woman — in the grace of her step — in the lustre of her eye — in the melody of her voice — in her soft laughter, in her sigh — in the harmony of the rustling of her robes. He deeply feels it in her winning endearments — in her burning enthusiasms — in her gentle charities — in her meek and devotional endurances — but above all — ah, far above all he kneels to it — he worships it in the faith, in the purity, in the strength, in the altogether divine majesty — of her love.”

I thought I’d give readers of The Teeming Brain a heads up that I’ll be the subject of a live chat over at the popular horror discussion forum The Lost and the Damned this coming Monday, November 13th.  The chat will take place at 10 p.m. Eastern time (which is of course 9 p.m. Central/8 p.m. Mountain/7 p.m. Pacific).  To get to the chat room, just visit the site’s main page and click the “Chat Room” link at the top.

Tangentially, I find it interesting that the list of upcoming chats looks almost like a roster of the people I just hung out with last weekend at the WFC in Austin:  Tim Waggoner, Ellen Datlow, Jeff Vandermeer, Elizabeth Bear.  Fun stuff.

Anyway, I do hope to see you there.  I promise to be as brilliantly fascinating and humbly unpretentious as I can possibly be.  The latter, I suppose, will be easy to achieve, since I don’t have anything to be pretentious about.  But the first might be a challenge.

I just returned last night from attending the World Fantasy Convention in Austin, Texas. I’ll be posting a full report on my experiences there some time in the next week or so, but right now, in order to meet my self-imposed weekly blog deadline, I thought I’d go ahead and share something I’ve been planning to post here for awhile.

Back in 2001 and 2002 when my first book, a collection of cosmic/spiritual horror stories titled Divinations of the Deep, was in the works with Ash-Tree Press, Brian McNaughton wrote an introduction for it that was so enthusiastic that it still makes me warm whenever I reread it. I had first met Brian in the late 1990s when I began participating in the newsgroup alt.horror.cthulhu, the venerable online forum centered around the discussion of all things Lovecraftian. I posted many a message exploring the philosophical underpinnings of Lovecraft’s fictional worlds and his deployment of certain techniques to create an effect of cosmic horror. Then when my story “Teeth” was published at Thomas Ligotti Online, Brian, whom I had never met before, read it and posted a rave review to the newsgroup. This led to an email exchange in which I thanked him for his kind words.

Confession time: I had never heard of him before all of this happened, and I was a relative Internet newbie at the time, so I hadn’t yet attained that level of savvy which leads all of us netheads nowadays to do an online search whenever we meet somebody new in cyberspace, in order to gather a contextual background if possible. (Plus, this was back in pre-Google days, when we were stuck with the likes of HotBot, Altavista, and the original Yahoo! for performing our websearches). Thus, a moment of embarrassment was inevitably in the offing.

It came after Brian and I had been in contact two or three times, when he made passing mention of a story he had recently written. I responded by saying, “Oh, are you a writer, too?” Now this was insanely stupid for at least two reasons. First, he had mentioned his status as an author, and in fact had given the title of one of his books, right there in that review of my story. But somehow, for some inexplicable reason, I was forgetting that.

Second, not only was he a writer, but he was a famous and well-established one at that. Earlier that very year, he had won the World Fantasy Award for his awesome cycle of dark fantasy stories, The Throne of Bones. Moreover, he had been writing and publishing since the 1970s (when I was just a young lad) and was presently being widely touted by various luminaries in the field, such as S.T. Joshi (who wrote an afterword for The Throne of Bones) and Alan Rodgers (who wrote a preface for the same book), as a writer of genius.

He didn’t tell me any of that in response to my dunderheaded query, by the way. Instead, he merely mentioned the title of his book again (since apparently the previous glaring reference to it had somehow escaped me) and left it to me to find out more if I wanted to. Which I did. The next time I wrote to him, I would have made prolific use of the “sheepish” emoticon if such a thing had existed.

We kept in touch after that, and when it became apparent that I was going to have a fiction collection published, I approached Brian to ask if he would write an introduction. He readily agreed. Unfortunately, what he wrote did not appear in the final published version, because the editors at Ash-Tree decided they liked the book better without it. So Brian’s contribution was shrunk to the level of a mere blurb (actually an excerpt from his introduction) that appeared inside the front cover flap. I have always been disappointed by this. I mean, it was Ash-Tree’s call, certainly, and I wasn’t about to argue with them, especially since it was quite a prestigious thing for me to have my first book published by such a prominent and well-respected publisher in the first place. But I knew Brian had labored hard on that introduction — surprisingly hard, he told me; it hadn’t come easy, and he wasn’t sure why — and I liked the way he had framed my stories in terms of a discussion of spiritual horror in general and Lovecraft and Ligotti in particular. He really seemed to understand what I was getting at in those stories, and I thought his introduction was quite illuminating.

That’s why I’ve decided, these four years later, to go ahead and publish it here instead of letting it molder in perpetual obscurity. The timing is particularly appropriate for this, by the way, since over the weekend at the World Fantasy Con I met Alan Rodgers for the first time. Brian gave me Alan’s email address in 2000 or 2001 and suggested that I contact him in order to see whether Alan would be interested in helping some of my work find publication. Alan had been acting as Brian’s editor for a while, and I recognized his name when it was mentioned to me. But for some reason — maybe because I stumbled into the Ash-Tree deal; it’s been so long that I forget exactly why — I never did contact him. So when I looked at his name tag this past Saturday and saw who he was, I was thrilled to meet him. I introduced myself and mentioned the McNaughton connection, and this led us into a very nice conversation. Alan stressed to me that Brian’s praise of my work had to have been absolutely sincere, because he (Brian) didn’t hesitate to lambast a person’s work if he thought poorly of it.

Sadly, Brian died two years ago after a protracted battle with cancer. We had fallen out of touch for a year or more before that, and it was only when the word of his death began to circulate among the speculative fiction community that I realized why he had been unable to communicate. This led to one of the weirdest griefs I have ever experienced, since I had never met him in person, and yet I felt a sense of friendship, familiarity, and gratitude toward him that was at odds with that fact.

If you’re a fan of Brian’s work, and especially if you ever saw any of his online communications, then you’ll probably recognize his characteristic tone of voice in the introduction that he wrote for my collection. I can only hope that he’d be happy to know his words are finally seeing the light of day.

* * * * *

Introduction to Matt Cardin’s Divinations of the Deep

by Brian McNaughton

I have never a been big fan of theological fantasies, grounded as they usually are in our preconceived notions of God, the Devil, and assorted angels, fallen or otherwise. Most of the author’s work has been done for him before he begins. The groundwork and the battle-plan exist in our minds, and we never doubt whom we should root for.

That doesn’t apply, of course, to John Milton: only the most perverse could cheer for such bores as Adam and God in preference to the flamboyant Satan. But it most certainly applies to almost all of those laboring in the lowly vineyard labeled “weird fiction.” Drawing their inspiration from such enormously successful potboilers as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist,” they accept the standard as a framework on which to hang what Count Floyd would have called “really scarrrry stories, boys and girls.”

Well, they never scared me, perhaps because the authors don’t take religion seriously. As ostensible practitioners of horror-fiction, they are missing a bet. In all its forms, including its most modern manifestation as psychotherapy, religion is the only human institution that directly confronts fear, the deepest and darkest emotion, the one that imposes tyrannical limits on our brief lives. . . and that lies in wait, unknowable, beyond those limits.

Intellectuals (and by that I mean those whose principal activity is mental, at whatever level of accomplishment) have long discounted religion, so it’s no surprise that the likes of Blatty and Levin should fail to take it seriously. H.P. Lovecraft didn’t take it seriously, either, but he recognized its enormous power in the very area — cosmic horror — that he wanted to stake out as his own. So he invented a pandemonium of evil entities that evoked the sort of horror that Satan could no longer evoke for people of Lovecraft’s mind-set. We don’t know what’s going on, he implied, but there are Things Out There that do; and the last thing we want to do is attract their notice. He even referred to the Bible of his invented religion, “The Necronomicon,” and we all know what a powerful grip this fictitious book has held on generations of readers.

Matt Cardin, like most of us, was floored by Lovecraft as a youngster and made an intensive study of his work. It shows — not through imitation, not by lifting a few names or symbols, but by his thorough appreciation of what cosmic horror is all about. As the product of an evangelical upbringing who has made a serious study of religion, presently working on a master’s degree in religious studies, and who has been involved in evangelical settings throughout his life, he knows that the Bible staked out the territory long before Lovecraft came on the scene. You might even say that he saw where Lovecraft went off the tracks by dismissing the power of the pre-existing symbols. In these masterly tales, he has steered the train back onto the mainline of Western religion.

I don’t want to suggest that these stories are devout or uplifting, or that they follow the Christian party line. Far from it. The reputed consolations of faith are notably absent from Matt’s bleak universe. Stories like “An Abhorrence to All Flesh” and “Judas of the Infinite” might get him in hot water with his co-religionists if they ponder too long the horrific implications. If they hold to the view that the Bible is true in every word, they might get some very queasy feelings by mulling over the quotations Matt has selected brilliantly from that book to shore up his hair-raising thesis in “Abhorrence.” Not only the Devil, but also Matt Cardin can quote Scripture to his purposes.

In this tale, he avoids the familiarity of the Good versus Evil conflict by standing the whole thing on its head. We don’t know whom to root for. . . and maybe we shouldn’t, lest we should be overheard.

I’ve read this story two or three times, and each time it gets more disturbing, like one of those Thomas Ligotti tales that burrow their way into your soul and leave you with a far less comfortable view of human existence. Ligotti is another of Cardin’s masters, but Matt has at the very least equaled him in this exercise. “The Basement Theatre” perhaps comes closest to the Ligotti mode by transferring the logic of dreams to the real world.

God Himself gets His comeuppance in “Judas,” a tale of pure cosmic horror if ever there was one. And both Good and Evil are put in perspective in “Notes of a Mad Copyist” as Matt gives us a hint of the all-devouring void that lies behind them both.

Matt Cardin comes by his credentials as a horror-writer honestly: not by reading Stephen King with a felt marker in hand and one eye on the cash-register, but by suffering through a dark night of the soul that very nearly undid him. I doubt that he ever sets out deliberately to write a “really scarrrry story,” unlike all too many practitioners of weird fiction.

He merely writes what he knows. . . God help him.

I’m pleased to announce that my interview with Thomas Ligotti, which I published here at The Teeming Brain last July, has been picked up by The New York Review of Science Fiction. For those who aren’t famliar with it, NYRSF is a prestigious, long-running critical journal edited by, among others, David Hartwell, whose editorial work has been of great importance to me.

The interview appears in the October 2006 issue (Issue 218, Vol. 19, No. 2), where — as I was not aware of until just today — it is featured as the main cover piece. So this certainly makes for a nice sense of gratification. There’s a page at Locus Online where you can see a summary of the issue’s contents, along with a miniscule cover scan.

For the record, Jason Van Hollander deserves a major thanks here, because he’s the one who suggested to me that I ought to consider submitting the interview to David and NYRSF in the first place. My relationship with Jason has proven to be most pleasant and productive over the years. His cover art for my fiction collection Divinations of the Deep was exquisitely perfect, and went on to play a part in his winning the 2004 World Fantasy Award. He is currently designing a cover for my forthcoming debut album from Daemonyx, “Curse of the Daimon.” Now he’s been instrumental in helping my Ligotti interview to achieve considerably wider exposure. So here’s to you, Jason..