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Friends,
To celebrate the release of Hawk Mountain in paperback, I’m releasing a series of episodes on my favorite genre, HORROR. Hawk Mountain being nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award was a surprise to me because it is the closest a horror novel has ever come to winning the prestigious award. But that surprise showed me the ways in which I stigmatize my own writing, the ways I fear it will be dismissed out of hand or afterwards for being too upsetting to readers.

In fact, this means that I’m afraid of horror itself. I think we all are. There are few genres that have inspired such a furor of regulation, stigma, and anger (aside from pornography, and pornography may be beyond genre and in fact its own form… more on that some other time).

Horror is regulated by governments, has been the topic of countless moralistic exams rations and moral panics, has been blamed for disintegrating societies, and more. Horror itself horrifies.

And when horror does become accepted, at best it is said by critics to “transcend the genre.” Which means it’s really just transcending the stigma the critics have by re-asserting it.

But who am I to talk about beleaguered horror? The fact is, it is also wildly popular. Even a terrible horror movie can be quite popular, and the most consistently bestselling author of all time is a horror writer. What does that mean?

Across these episodes, I’ll be talking about horror in its many forms: cosmic horror, body horror, suburban horror, monster horror, possession horror, and more; with some of my favorite horror creators and horror thinkers.

We’ll be asking the deep questions and seeing what unlit paths they lead us down. What is horror for? Whay do we condemn it even as we flock to it? What is the horror-nature of being? What happens when the imagination explores the violence, the darkness, and the screaming in the inner landscape and when we conjure it into art?

You don’t have to know much horror or even like horror to follow along with these episodes; each one will reveal a horror of life, of being human. Horror remains the best tool to investigate evil and to overcome it.

To kick off this series, I’ll start with the tension between the horrors of the cosmos and the horrors of the personal, with horror scholar and writer, MATT CARDIN .

Matt first came to my attention via his appearances on the Weird Studies podcast (first on WS 41, then on WS 126), where he spoke with such frightening depth about horror that I knew the horrifying must have, across his life, shocked him into new avenues of being. He’s the author of many books, including the story collection, To Rouse Leviathan and also What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy.

I’m so happy to share this episode, and this series with you.

SHOW NOTES

WHAT OTHER EPISODE SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO?
In some ways the first episode in this series is really AEWCH 201, on the Spiritual Life of Horror. Horror offers spiritual insight and can be a doorway to spiritual growth. I hope you’ll listen to and find some meaning there.

WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ?
Since he comes up so much on this episode, it’s probably best to refer you here to Thomas Ligotti. A selection of his work is most readily available as Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscirbe (which has an intro by Annihilation author Jeff Vandermeer!) Since it’s not in that colection, but we talk about it on the show, you can read Ligotti’s “The Red Tower” here.

MORE ON MATT
Matt’s website, which has tons of stuff to get into is here. is also the author and editor of many other books, including Dark Awakenings and the unfortunately hard-to-find Born To Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti.