A collection of essays, introductions, and interviews spanning two decades and focusing on the intersection of supernatural horror fiction and film with religion, spirituality, and philosophy. Includes six papers on the works of Thomas Ligotti, substantial essays on a variety of horror topics (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, George Romero's Living Dead films, the history of the angel and the demon), and selected interviews from various publications in which the author lays out the religious and literary perspectives that underpin his own horror stories.
I started this book at the back, reading the last hundred pages first, where the remarkable interviews appear. They manifest one of Cardin's best traits, which the rest of us should learn to imitate. He lays out his ideas, not as just floating in intellectual space, but as directly connected with life experiences and the texts -- literary, religious, and philosophical -- that have unsettled him to the depths. There is always a fully-disclosed person speaking. His journey becomes our journey. Where Cardin is ambivalent, torn between two views and sensing that both, though seeming opposites, may somehow be true or revelatory, he does not try to resolve the tension or hammer it into a univocal blueprint. That is the most adequate way to comprehend a complex, multi-layered reality. Next, I read the 50 pages of "The Spaces Between," which spoke to my interests as a former philosophy professor. These essays show that Cardin is a keen critical thinker as well as a profoundly creative one. The reader sees these two traits working out a vivid dialectic with each other. As a result, his critical thinking is itself creative; and his creative thinking is under critical control or, one might say, authority. But, in fact, in Cardin's work, the imaginative is just as authoritative as the rational. I strongly recommend this splendid collection of explorations of the voice of the daemon.
