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..
