Now Available: DARK AWAKENINGS

Over 300 pages of supernatural horror fiction and academic nonfiction exploring the boundary between religion, horror, and spirituality.

CLICK HERE to purchase the book directly from the publisher and receive with it a CD of Matt's dark and thematically related music.

You can also buy the book online (from Amazon, Gavincuss Books, and other booksellers) or from your local bookstore.

NEWS

Updated June 8, 2010

Last month Mathew F. Riley and the other good folks at Horror Reanimated started asking a number of horror writers to name and explain the single book they would like to be buried with. They published my entry in the series on June 7. Rereading it, I think I may have finally managed to explain to my own satisfaction why I’m helplessly hooked on both supernatural horror and books about philosophy, religion, and spirituality. Previous entries in the series have come from Mark Samuels, Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, Adam Nevill, Mark Morris, Brian Lumley, Reggie Oliver, Michael Marshall Smith, David Moody, Christopher Golden, Gary McMahon, and Simon Strantzas — a fine crowd to be associated with, for sure.

In other news, the latest issue of Dead Reckonings features a review full of love for Dark Awakenings:

It is refreshing to see that there are still authors interested in and capable of portraying a species of dread that is dependent neither on the standard bogeymen of horror fiction nor in pain and the thread of bodily dissolution as ends in themselves….The philosophical and theological bases for Cardin’s horror run deep….[He brings] his ideas to vivid, immediate life through his excellent descriptive skills, believable characters, well-described settings, and an unusually apt gift for choosing metaphors when attempting to describe the ineffable….In “Teeth,” comparative religion, philosophy, and quantum mechanics meet in a mandala that offers the clearest expression of Azathoth as the universal maw since Lovecraft. Perhaps even more devastating is “The God of Foulness,” which posits a cult based on the incarnation through disease of the third god in an unholy trinity, served by a text riddled with redirected, misquoted, and parodied extracts from the world’s spiritual texts. Cardin’s ability to detail the full implications of ideas that utterly destroy “the human need for illusion” reveals the forces behind those ideas in action, without risking anticlimax, and demonstrates the impact they have on the lives of characters in whom readers can recognize themselves; this lends the stories a terrific impact.

- Jim Rockhill, reviewing Dark Awakenings for Dead Reckonings #7 (Spring 2010)

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