Matt Cardin's Blog, page 7

Initiation by Nightmare

Dear Living Dark reader,

The following essay appears in my 2022 book What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy. I am reprinting it here, with a few multimedia enhancements specifically added for this online version, because I think its topic, theme, and focus—which uses my spiritually and psychologically traumatic/transformative experiences of sleep paralysis in the 1990s as a springboard to broader reflections on the nature of creativity and reality—will be of distinct...

Nonduality and the Daimon: Enemies or Allies?

Dear Living Dark reader,

Two of the most deeply felt fascinations that have gripped me over the years—and they’re honestly not just fascinations but full-blown obsessions, the chief orienting points of my life—are the matters of spiritual awakening and purpose or calling. You could also call them nonduality (finding out who I really am and what the world really is) and the daimon (understanding the specific energy that moves me, my reason for being, what I am supposed to be doing with the life ex...

What Should I Title My Next Book?

Dear Living Dark reader,

I write today to ask for your creative help.

When I launched this newsletter back in September 2022, I knew it might end up becoming a repository for material that I would one day want to transform into a book. Nineteen month later, that day has arrived. Essays have accumulated. Connections have suggested themselves. A preliminary structure to organize at least twenty-one posts (and maybe more, plus additional material) into three sections has emerged. There’s a good energ...

Reading Notes 1

Dear Living Dark reader,

This is the first post in what will be an occasional, ongoing series. I’ll use it to track what I’m presently reading, researching, studying, and textually imbibing and enjoying—books, articles, essays, stories— by paraphrasing and labeling core points, quoting especially striking passages, and noting down my brief thoughts, reactions, and reflections. Consider it a slimmed down version of the “Notes and Gleanings” series that I published intermittently during the first y...

The Daimon of Pen and Page

Dear Living Dark reader,

What are you really, principally about as a writer? And not only that, but what are you principally about as a reader?

These paired questions have become more important to me over the years. And they should be important to you, too. Because the two roles are not separate. Your core orientation in each role, that of writer and that of reader, has significant implications for both your relationship to the books and writers you cherish and your relationship to the things you ...

The Eye Through Which God Sees Me

Dear Living Dark reader,

Following on from “The Abyss of Doubt” and “Stumbling across God,” here is the third and final installment of “My Search for Certainty,” the essay that I wrote nearly thirty years ago, at age 25, to articulate my own philosophical and spiritual beliefs to a friend who had challenged me to do this after listening to me quote from a host of books for months on end. Remember, the first installment contains a full introduction, newly written by me for you, that explains the e...

Horror Goes to War

Dear Living Dark reader,

It’s such an obvious question, but somebody has to ask it: How can a knowledge of the techniques of horror fiction help to improve military planning? (Obvious, right?) And for answering such a question, who could be better positioned than an associate professor in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School? And who better to summarize and amplify the matter than the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College?

Today, as a momentary...

Private Nightmares, Digital Ghosts, and Anti-Productivity

Dear Living Dark reader,

Recently several short pieces—mini-essays, in effect—have spontaneously come out of my pen, or rather my keyboard. Sometimes I share such things on social media or at my author website. Today I decided to group three of them here and share them with you.

They are nominally unrelated to each other. Then again, I’m a great believer in the truth that Donna Tartt noted when commenting on the eleven years it took her to write The Goldfinch, which had its origin in things she ha...

Stumbling Across God

Dear Living Dark reader,

Here is the second post in a three-post series in which I publish, for the first time anywhere, a long essay that I wrote in 1996 at age twenty-five for a friend and philosophical sparring partner who had endured many months of my quote-laden conversational style, in which I offered an unending stream of references to and quotations from a multitude of books and thinkers. He finally asked me to state what I, as Matt, really thought and believed on my own. “My Search for C...

The Abyss of Doubt

Dear Living Dark reader,

Have you ever been excited by an old manuscript discovery when the manuscript was written by you? This happened to me recently when I stumbled across a nearly ten thousand-word essay that I wrote almost thirty years ago for an audience of one. Or maybe an audience of two, if you count me.

In February and March 1996, when I was in my mid-twenties, about a year and a half after writing my first horror story, “Teeth” (which was not published until 1998), and six months before...