My friend Richard Gavin, the talented author of Omens (which I praised in a review for Dead Reckonings) and The Darkly Splendid Realm (which is drawing praise from all quarters), has written an enthusuastic review of my Dark Awakenings.
A couple of pertinent excerpts:
To be genuinely inspired by a work of Horror is a fairly rare occurrence for me. Rarer still is my being left awe-struck after discovering a book with which I resonated so deeply that I felt an instant kinship with its author. Such a delightful reaction has happened only a handful of times in my life: when I first discovered H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti, when I read the first book-length collections by Simon Strantzas and Mark Samuels, and now with Dark Awakenings, the latest book by Matt Cardin.
. . . . [P]erhaps Matt’s most enviable quality is his ability to seamlessly smudge deep philosophical principles into his narratives without coming off as didactic. “Teeth,” “The Stars Shine Without Me” and in particular his novella The God of Foulness truly exhibit this talent. Cardin makes a reader ponder the nature of reality, yet at a turn he can summon images of startling terror, visions that unnerved this Horror author more than once.
The part about the felt sense of kinship is the most gratifying. As any creative writer or artist can tell you, that’s the holy grail of the entire artistic enterprise: making contact with somebody whose inner world vibrates with your own. Thanks, Richard.