Really enjoyed the stories in Part 1, but as it went, it got a bit too Ligotti-wannabe for me.

In 1996, a remarkable omnibus was published by Caroll & Graf: The Nightmare Factory, by horror author Thomas Ligotti. It contained three volumes of Ligotti’s work to date plus an additional volume featuring revelatory, new stories that had never been collected. The book, long out of print, remains a gem of horror fiction that few others can rival.Now, in the late Summer of 2019, at least one omnibus is worthy to sit on the shelf next to Ligotti’s tome: To Rouse Leviathan, by another remarkable,

I have no words at this moment. Give me a moment.

Thomas Ligotti has become a titan of the genre due to his unique vision and stylistic adeptness. Much is made of his pessimism, but I believe that it's only one piece of the puzzle. Yes, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race lays out a wicked tract against life itself, but what is alluring to me is not what it says about the world, but what it says about its author. Since his inception into the horror mainstream, many have come around to his outlook—imbuing their works with corporate horror, aca...

Apocryphal, hedonistic and at once calming in their nihilism, Cardins tales of woe are a real highlight of modern horror literature.

(three stars)I personally find Cardin's cosmic horror to lack the innately haunted sense of life that so vitally characterized the works of his most relevant predecessors in this subgenre. And his much-discussed erudition doesn't compensate for this lack. After all, the metaphysical grounding of his oeuvre derives from the well-known temporal ambiguity suggested in the first chapter of Genesis: the "dark and formless void" which might have preceded the Creator itself. Many of his stories are jus...

Worth buyingWell, this author really really doesn’t like Ain Sof, that’s for sure! At least that’s how it seems... at first. There are an awful lot of stories in this volume, of middling to nearly-great quality, and they seem to be arranged in a way that unfolds or reveals the author’s increasingly subtler understanding of the universe and our being within it, over the course of the stories. So while the first narrator seems unbearably naive, and the story told us similarly... unsophisticated? t...

These are deeply philosophical stories of a cosmic bent, but Cardin brings along a uniquely theological angle. These stories point to interpretations of religion not as a soothing fantasy as it's typically seen as in cosmic horror, but as something that has been misinterpreted, which in fact can reveal dark truths about our place in the universe and the malevolent God that rules it, if we dare to look.I was underwhelmed by this collection and expecting better. There's little middle ground for me...

A fantastic collection of short fiction spanning more than a decade of Cardin's writing career. He manages to center most stories around an unsettling nexus of conventional religion, cosmic horror, and deep, troubling nihilism in the vein of Ligotti. There are enough variations on the theme that the collection stays fresh and profoundly on point throughout, frequently leaving the reader with a disorienting sense of mounting dread. Really solid work and a strong balance of some weighty philosophi...

Was enjoying this book until I got to this line in a short story: 'Over the years I have become an assiduous student of Lovecraft, not just his stories but his essays and letters. And I have marveled at the man's uncanny ability to see so deeply into the truth and yet remain so composed and kindhearted." Nope.

I wanted to give this 5 stars. I really did. This is a phenomenal collection of stories but the stories here, unfortunately, have many fundamental flaws in my opinion.Let’s talk about those flaws first.First and foremost, the collection is very repetitive. This is usually the case with single author collections but this one is even more repetitive than that. It sometimes feels like you’re reading author’s various essays on the same subject. Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate author’s exploratio...

4.25/5. It kills me that I can't give this five stars. So much of this was excellent but there are enough detractors from the rest of the perfection to where I can't overlook them.One of my favorite modern horror authors is John Langan. I like him because of his unique mythological and theological take on cosmic horror, and his wonderful marriage of literary beauty and genre tension. Matt Cardin's 'To Rouse Leviathan' does everything I just mentioned, but even better than Langan does. Seriously....

It has been many a moon, over a lustrum in fact, since I have last read a collection of Matt Cardin fiction (the first one I read, DARK AWAKENINGS, was back in 2010, while in 2013 I read DIVINATIONS OF THE DEEP), so it was a pleasure to read this new omnibus and revisit many of those prior tales, though the final four that make up the "Apocryphon" portion of the present collection were all new to me. Before I say anything further I just want to say that, in a genre where one can easily think of

It's an overwhelming book- an elegant and profound hybrid of theology, ontology, religion and mythology; all of these elements condensed to produce one of the best outcomes in weird fiction and horror, unique in every way.I believe it covers the entirety of the author's work, spanning more than a decade. Some pieces have been significantly revised and polished for this very collection. Isn't that juicy?!First let me start by saying this that Matt Cardin is one of those current and active authors...

If you like an author who thinks everyone talks the same and thinks alliterations and adjectives are substitutes for style, walls of boring text that are painfully repetitive, ideas both rote and stale, and did I mention how painfully repetitive and dull it all is? Only for the "intellectual elite" who are no doubt going to make far fetched assumptions about my character in the comments below.

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore I didn't know what to expect when I picked up Matt Cardin's collection of fiction To Rouse Leviathan. I've read a lot of strange / horror fiction in my time. Like so many of us who reckon ourselves aficionados (read dilettante...

This is an outstanding collection of short stories based around the eternal nothingness that presses upon existence and the insignificance of our hollow lives... It sounds bleak because it is, so beautifully bleak.Matt's writing is truly masterful; each word has a reason to be there and has had a wealth of thought put into it. The mix of spirituality and cosmic fiction works together perfectly, to the point that the book starts to feel like a secret truth behind the universe and that this is its...

There is a strong theological bend to this collection, often setting Christian dogma adjacent to Nyarlathotep and Shub Niggurath in cosmic indifference. “The New Pauline Corpus” is more than just a blasphemous treatise, but hints at a shattered world around the edges of our unreliable narrator. “The God of Foulness” is a gripping novella that explores and inhabits a nihilist cult. The craftsmanship here is deft as the author bringing us in as a curious outsider, but infects us and then tensely,

Matt Cardin delivers a thick and consistently interesting collection of cosmic horror short stories in his collection, To Rouse Leviathan. Over the course of sixteen tales, he tackles the challenges Christianity poses to abyssal horror, and vice versa, infusing his explorations of Lovecraftian weirdness with decidedly religious and philosophical undertones that really help to elevate and separate his own particular brand of the strange and peculiar.In case you didn't glom onto it already, To Rou...