The Living Dark
Creativity, consciousness, religion, horror, culture, and the examined writing life
The Living Dark was my primary home for essays, reflections, and other ongoing writing from 2022 to 2026. I created it as the successor to The Teeming Brain.
Where TTB had deliberately sprawled across a multiverse of subjects, The Living Dark represented a shift toward something more personal and concentrated. It became a place for me to write about creativity and the inner life, horror and the weird, religion and spirituality, consciousness and culture, books and writers, education and technology, and the obscure undercurrents that connect all these things. Threaded through it all was a recurring concern with what it means to follow a creative, intellectual, or spiritual summons whose destination is impossible to know in advance. In other words, the fact and phenomenon of living into the dark.
TLD took the form of an email newsletter and website hosted on Substack. Some pieces were substantial essays. Others were shorter reflections, notes, announcements, excerpts, or experiments. Over time it also became the main place where I communicated directly with readers who were interested in my books and ongoing work.
In retrospect, The Living Dark now looks like a transitional chapter in the longer history of my writing on the web. It grew directly out of The Teeming Brain, but it also helped clarify what I wanted my online work to become: not a separate publication standing alongside my books and author website, but part of a single body of work gathered under my own name.
In 2026, I therefore ended The Living Dark as an independent publication and relocated my ongoing essays and other new writing to MattCardin.com. The original Substack remains online as an archive that I will occasionally update with material first published here:
I will also republish pieces at this site. But as with The Teeming Brain, I don’t intend to reproduce every item indiscriminately. Instead, I’ll gradually gather and organize the essays, reflections, and other pieces that seem most worth preserving as part of the continuing record of my work.