SEE MATT CARDIN'S OFFICIAL WEB PRESENCES:

Website: MattCardin.com

BLOG: The Teeming Brain

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BIO:

Matt Cardin is the author of the cosmic horror fiction collection Divinations of the Deep (2002). His second book, Dark Awakenings (forthcoming in 2009), will feature stories and essays exploring the intersections between religion (in which subject he has a master’s degree) and horror. He also co-edited with best-selling novelist T.M. Wright a two-volume anthology titled Holy Horrors, which features stories from new and established voices and is scheduled to appear from Ash-Tree Press in late 2009 and early 2010.

His stories, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, The HWA Presents: Dark Arts, Alone on the Darkside, The Thomas Ligotti Reader, Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dead Reckonings, Lovecraft Annual, The Children of Cthulhu, In Delirium II, The Best of Horrorfind 2, and elsewhere. He is also a successful freelance blogger, consultant, and copywriter, and will contribute several entries, including an examination of vampires and religion, to the forthcoming reference work Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture, edited by S.T. Joshi. He has read from his work and appeared as a panelist at The World Fantasy Convention, The World Horror Convention, ArmadilloCon, and Mo*Con: The Intersection of Spirituality, Art, and Gender.

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PRAISE:

“Matt Cardin's horror stories are the real thing: works that are committed to expressing what is irremediably strange and terrible in human existence.” – Thomas Ligotti

"It's a bold writer who, in this day and age, tries to make modern horror fiction out of theology, but Cardin pulls it off.” – Darrell Schweitzer

"Matt Cardin is one of those rare horror authors who is also a true scholar and intellectual. His studies in philosophy and religion inform his fiction, which is heavily influenced by both Lovecraft and Ligotti, and his work is usually the highlight of whatever venue it graces." – Jack Haringa

“Matt Cardin's stories display a thorough appreciation of what cosmic horror is all about.” – Brian McNaughton

“[In the anthology Dark Arts,] Matt Cardin and Mark McLaughlin team to produce the sophisticated and thought-provoking ‘Nightmares, imported and domestic’, in which a painter has black-and-white dreams of another self, living a different life. The boundaries between the two existences become increasingly thin, to the point of merging in a single, tragic reality. This remarkable piece of work, possibly the best in the book, brings in echoes of Kafka and Dostoyevsky, overcoming the limits of genre fiction.” – Mario Guslandi

“Matt Cardin's story ‘Teeth’ manages to affectively capture Lovecraft's sense of cosmic horror, working Lovecraftian themes and tropes in with Nietzschean philosophy. The bitter loneliness and nihilism of the story cast a pall over the rest of the day that I read it. I don't come across stories that make a difference in my mood very often, so I consider this one fairly special.” – John Goodrich       

Panel Speaker at ArmadilloCon 31, Austin, TX, 2009.

Guest of Honor at Mo*Con III: The Intersection of Art, Spirituality, and Gender, Indianapolis, IN, 2008.

Panel Speaker at ArmadilloCon 29, Austin, TX, 2007.

Panel Speaker at World Fantasy Convention 2006, Austin, TX.

Panel Speaker at World Horror Convention 2003, Kansas City, MO.

Panel Speaker at World Horror Convention 2002, Chicago, IL.

Panel Speaker at World Horror Convention 2001, Seattle, WA.

The final table of contents for Dark Awakenings is now available. Thomas Ligotti says, "In Dark Awakenings, Cardin proves himself to be an adept in the fullest sense of the word. To both the morbid and the cosmically minded, who may be one and the same, he delivers his visions and nightmares in a master’s prose. In the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, Cardin’s accomplishments as a writer are paralleled by his expertise as a literary critic and theorist, as readers can witness in this volume. His analyses of supernatural horror and its practitioners are also dark awakenings in the dual manner of his stories, with one eye on the black abyss and the other on an enlightened transcendence without denomination. Again, this quality of Cardin’s work can be seen in the writings of Poe and Lovecraft, two other felicitous freaks who merged the antagonistisms of their imagination into a chimera as awful as it is awe-striking."

The Teeming Brain
Matt’s popular “blog about everything,” but especially about but horror, religion, philosophy, psychology, consciousness, literature, film, technopoly, apocalypse, peak oil, economic collapse, media madness, educational idiocies, cultural trends, and the unfolding of dystopian futures (and presents). The guiding thread is a voracious love of ideas.

MattCardin.com
Official website

Matt Cardin on Twitter

Interview with Matt Cardin - August 2008