Well, the Amazon turns up Dark Awakenings but for an eye watering £23.75.
A bit pricey for me, especially to splash out on a new author I've not tried before. But if he is as good as Ligotti, it may just be worth it.
I didn't say he was as good as Ligotti. In truth, it is difficult to make that judgment. Ligotti is the superior stylist, but Cardin is the superior storyteller.
I mostly appreciate Ligotti for his expertise in creating a weird and disconcerting atmosphere for his stories. Moreover, he is an absolutely magnificent writer. But when I am reading his works I always feel alienated and disconnected, as if I am an observer but not a participant. This seems to be a deliberate element of his style. Also, his characters are so bizarre that it is absolutely impossible to relate with them at all. And, to be fair, Ligotti has stated that he has no interest in writing about normal people. It leads to reading that is very enjoyable but not especially gripping.
Cardin, while still a very good writer, doesn't have nearly as distinctive a style as Ligotti does. A page of Ligotti's fiction is like nothing else you'll ever encounter, whereas Cardin's work, while extremely well-told, is not written in such a way that you could imagine only Matt Cardin being the author. In many ways I find him superior to Ligotti, though. First, his stories are incredibly engaging. They exerted an almost magnetic pull on my attention, whereas it isn't uncommon for me to space out when reading a Ligotti work and get lost in my own mental nightmare world. The narrative elements of his works are of secondary importance to the atmosphere. Secondly, Cardin is able to find a middle ground between normal people and Ligotti's basket-cases with his characters. Thirdly, Cardin's work is much more academic, in that he pulls in many outside ideas and connects the dots between many different concepts and disciplines, which I find absolutely fascinating.
If nothing else, the collection is worth reading for the first piece, Teeth, which is the most horrifying story I've ever read in my life. I was already going through a kind of grieving process when I read it, and so that put me over the edge into a kind of paranoid and borderline delirious state for several hours afterward. I'm sure if I had been in a normal mood that I wouldn't have been so powerfully affected by it, but it still remains, even upon multiple re-reads, an incredibly overwhelming work of fiction.
Only about half of the book is fiction, though. The book's second half is composed of fascinating essays on: 1. the conceptual history of the angel and the demon, 2. a spiritual analysis of George Romero's Living Dead trilogy, and 3. a "horrific reading" of the Book of Isaiah from the Holy Bible.
