A heads-up to all of my readers here at Demon Muse: My first book, Divinations of the Deep, is now available in an ebook edition.
PURCHASE IT FROM THE PUBLISHER: Ash-Tree Press
PURCHASE IT FROM Amazon
First published in 2002 by Ash-Tree Press (which also published the new ebook), Divinations is a collection of five cosmic/supernatural horror stories that all deal with the intermingling of horror with deep religious and philosophical themes — just like my second book, last year’s Dark Awakenings. At least two of the stories pointedly address the issue of creative artistic inspiration in a manner that invokes the same psychological-spiritual reality I’ve been exploring here at Demon Muse and in A Course in Demonic Creativity.
“Notes of a Mad Copyist” is set in a medieval monastery, and it tells the story of a Christian monk whose job is to copy the Holy Scriptures by hand. His passionate spiritual life is invaded by a nightmarish horror, which he eventually learns to embrace and exult in, when he finds that his work has been taken over by a force that may be older than God, and that compels his hand to write a new scripture that speaks of a nightside reality impinging on God’s orderly creation. What’s more, the monastery’s abbot, who would otherwise be expected to condemn such blasphemy, proves to be an agent of that darkness itself. D. F. Lewis has said of the story, “Writing Horror, as I have done for many years, does bring one’s own abbot ‘shadow’ as tutelary guardian angel only to find out it’s a demon not an angel…This whole book is Fiction-as-Religion in action. It is truer than truth.”
The second of the two stories in question, titled “If It Had Eyes,” tells of a self-absorbed painter who, after years of being enchanted by the dreamlikeness of the nocturnal fog roiling over the Atlantic ocean, finally learns the secret of painting it: “When the fog began to roll in once more from the black waters, claiming first the breakwater, then the harbor, and then the town itself, I was shocked, overjoyed, elated beyond my wildest expectation when fingers of the most delicate whiteness curled lightly about my arm and hand, guiding me to the colors and strokes, the blendings and shadings, that would express at long last the color of my soul. I expended no effort, but simply tilted my head back to gaze up into the smoky white void while the fog worked through me to reproduce itself on the canvas.”
The other three stories likewise address in their respective ways the question or issue of the power that ultimately motivates and directs each of us by lying behind our souls and shaping our thoughts, emotions, actions, and lives. If you find the exploration of these matters in the context of the daimonic muse of creativity here at Demon Muse to be of interest, then you’ll likely find Divinations of the Deep to be interesting as well.
Here are what some readers have said about it:
Praise for Divinations of the Deep
“This collection was everything I’d hoped it would be, and that doesn’t happen often. Divinations of the Deep contains five stories that share the same Judeo-Christian religious theme. But this isn’t a book that you’ll find in Jerry Falwell’s library. This collection goes far beyond Judeo-Christian tradition, far beyond God, into the dark possibilities of what existed before God…Like Lovecraft and Ligotti, Cardin excels in creating a truly terrifying atmosphere of dread and decay by revealing what may lurk just beyond our view of reality. Few people succeed in this, but Matt does it with aplomb. His prose is intelligent and poetic, his execution, effortless. I believe this collection will become a classic of weird fiction.”
— Durant Haire, writing for Feoamante.com
“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. Like most heretics, he may be wrong in the eyes of the Church, but he can cite texts: lots of scary Old Testament passages that suggest a gnostic mystery underlying perceived reality. What was the ‘face of the deep’ upon which there was darkness, before the first act of Creation? Was God’s act one of pushing back or containing a primal Chaos older and vaster than Himself? Cardin manages to turn this into a vision of terrifying, Lovecraftian nihilism. No mean feat, that.”
— Darrell Schweitzer
“Cardin massages the dark and hidden, and penetrates the ancient deep to fashion unique visions of horror and deity. Each piece has its own depth and unwavering regard to the theme. The settings are universally dark, murky, and decadent, putting you in mind of Poe especially, but also some of the more depressed turn-of-the-(20th)Century writers. In each of these stories, the author personalizes the apocalyptic question of ultimate power and order. It is a fascinating approach.”
— Cemetery Dance
“Matt Cardin’s stories display a thorough appreciation of what cosmic horror is all about…[H]e 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 Divinations of the Deep, 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. He 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. He merely writes what he knows.”
— Brian McNaughton
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