To Rouse Leviathan by Matt Cardin, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

New York: Hippocampus Press, 2019; $20.00 tpb; 374 pages

Post-Ligottian Fiction

A lot of people go mad in this book. This is not just an occupational hazard for Matt Cardin’s characters; it almost seems required of them. Most of the stories involve someone discovering that the universe, existence itself, is hostile and unutterably foul so that the best we can do is hold back chaos and death for a little while, for all it may not be worth doing. In one of the most impressive pieces, a novella aptly enough entitled “The God of Foulness,” a wannabe religious scholar turned newspaper reporter investigates the “Sick Seekers,” a new death-and-transcendence cult that embraces disease so that the foulness of both body and soul may subsumed into its divinity, which is, in effect, the universe:

Everything is empty and good for nothing but to rot, except for this chaos, this madness, this filth. In the end, there is no real choice for me to make, for I have nothing else from which to choose. Nor do any of us. (279)

Meanwhile somebody else discovers the devouring nature of existence (“Teeth”), and in “Judas of the Infinite” the narrator, who seems to be God himself, disintegrates into a litany of Ligottian denial, which directly echoes the memorable ending of Ligotti’s “Nethescurial.” (“I am not dying and taking my cosmos with me. I am not dying. I am not.”)

If all these ruminations sound a little bit like a demented version of Gnosticism or some other bit of theological esoterica, it is because Cardin has an eerie and disquieting knack for finding the most morbid and disturbing passages in the holy books of the world’s religions—presumably real ones—to which he adds an occasional quote from Lovecraft or the Necronomicon. Indeed, “Notes of a Mad Copyist” is about a Christian monk assigned to the scriptorium, who finds himself deviating more and more from the Biblical passages he is supposed to be copying until the awful truth is revealed. Cardin’s great originality stems from this use of religious material, something Lovecraft would have shrugged off as of no use in any attempt to apprehend the nature of reality. But Cardin uses theology where Lovecraft used science and where Ligotti has used secular philosophy. Think of the result as a cross between the Ligotti of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and Charles Williams, only a Charles Williams who has become convinced that Ligotti is right. Not all the pieces are conventional stories. Some read like strange screeds and meditations, indeed, by madmen, although there is more of a tendency toward actual incident and narrative in the longer pieces. This is a book of fiction, not a theological treatise, after all. There are many moments of thoroughly disquieting awe.

For all his echoes of Lovecraft, even occasional invocations of the Cthulhu Mythos itself (full disclosure here: I published one of these stories, “The New Pauline Corpus,” in my DAW anthology Cthulhu’s Reign in 2010), Cardin is much more of a post-Ligottian writer than a post-Lovecraftian one. The Lovecraft influence is more general, part of the common culture these days and also filtered through Ligotti. Think of Michael Chabon’s “The God of Dark Laughter.” Of course Cardin isn’t famous, so he doesn’t get to publish something like that in The New Yorker, but his work and that particular Chabon piece have a lot in common. They echo Lovecraft but through a Ligottian filter.

Now that Ligotti has, apparently, worked up to a climax of his career and thought in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and only gives interviews these days, it is time to start noticing his influence. A post-Ligottian school is emerging. It is highly meditative, highly internalized, generating horror more from its ideas—the realization of man’s place in a devouring or decaying cosmos—than from plot and incident. It is as far removed from the Stephen King sort of horror or from the Splatterpunks (remember them?) as it is possible to be. But it’s there, and it’s growing. Or festering.

This is not the future of horror for the bestseller lists, but it might be the future of horror.

To Rouse Leviathan contains seventeen stories, two in collaboration with Mark McLaughlin. It includes all six items first collected in Cardin’s long out-of-print Ash-Tree Press collection, Divinations of the Deep (2002). Many of the others come from Ligotti-related publications or web sites. There is an unusually striking cover by Michael Hutter. A first-rate production all around, even if it may slowly drive you mad.

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Darrell Schweitzer lives in Philadelphia.