What the Daemon Said

Advance Praise for Matt Cardin and What the Daemon Said

“This is the perfect companion piece to Matt Cardin’s fiction omnibus To Rouse Leviathan. We’re lucky that Matt exists in our world at this particular time and place, in which the weirdness of our day-to-day reality is in dire need of his deeply humanistic criticisms, ideas, suggestions, and presence.”

—Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism

“What the Daemon Said is more than a must-read collection of essays; it’s the ultimate handbook for anyone with an interest in horror. More specifically, it’s about how horror, philosophy, and religion have combined to create an ever-evolving tapestry of our existence on planet earth, a layer of human consciousness that Cardin peels apart like a celestial onion with an army of dark gods hidden at its core. This book is a mind-blowing mandala that will take you by the hand and show you wonders and secrets you never could have imagined. Matt Cardin is one of the genre’s greatest minds, and this collection is essential reading for every writer and reader in the field.”

—Philip Fracassi, author of Beneath a Pale Sky

“For my money, Matt Cardin is the most interesting voice in horror criticism of our time. His investigations into the intersection of religion and horror get to the root of what makes this literary mode so potent and so profound. The arrival of this book is an event to be celebrated. It belongs on the shelf of every reader who cares about the human mind, creativity, and how they relate to this bleak and beautiful literature.”

—Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters and Wounds

“A fine, wide-ranging exploration of the deepest wellsprings of nightmare and chthonic revelation; of the roots of the monstrous and mythopoetic. A look at the bases and the underpinnings of our deepest fears and some of our finest dark literature. Mystagogic initiation from Matt Cardin.”