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Re: Compilation of blurbs by Thomas Ligotti
Cardin, Matt, To Rouse Leviathan, Hippocampus Press, 2019
Online:
"To Rouse Leviathan is one of those rare books that produces in a reader the most important reaction one can have to a work of, let us say, the literature of abomination. This reaction takes the form of a question: "From where could this marvel have come?" Quite aside from revealing an admiration for the author’s adept handling of spectral atrocities in such a work, the reader’s inquiry is more significant as testimony to an astonishment at the raw fact of its emergence."
"The origin of this singular astonishment deserves further explication. While excelling in the domain of high imagination and literary achievement (when Matt Cardin sets his sights on conveying an idea or effect incongruous with equanimity, he invariably takes it as far as it can be artistically taken), To Rouse Leviathan contains an added element necessary to the provocation of the foregoing question. Pervaded by the aura of a domain at once monstrous and not of this world, the book is conspicuous as a worthy descendant of a distinguished line of supernatural horror. As such, it is successful in its aim — which is endemic to efforts, capable or not, in the genre of relevance here — to create a breviary of gruesome mysteries, the qualifier "gruesome" in this case being apt only because everything in the visible world warrants an inauspicious characterization of the invisible. It is, in fact, mysteries of this kind that compose the added element, the necessary constituent, that causes the interrogatory outburst, "From where could this marvel have come?" Furthermore, each one of Matt Cardin’s stories carries the message that there is an “elsewhere” that, by its nature, to quote a scholar of this realm, is both appalling and alluring. That the so-called reality we bump into on a daily basis should be seen as pure misconception is a fundamental assumption of Matt Cardin’s vision."
"Without question, Cardin is no dilettante in the conception and expression of that which we would not know and yet, if our lives are to partake of mysteries that alone can give them meaning, we crave to know. To offer some satisfaction for this awful and wondrous craving is the gift of this book."
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