The Teeming Brain
Channeling the multiverse of ideas
Looking for The Teeming Brain?
Youâre in the right place. The original site has now been retired, and this page is its new archive home at MattCardin.com. Iâm rebuilding the archive gradually, so a piece reached through an old link may not yet be available here. Selected essays, interviews, and other material will return over time.
What Iâll put together wonât be a complete mirror of the old site, since that would be impractical. (The final blog was vast, consisting of more than 800 posts and nearly 400,000 words.) Instead, Iâm slowly restoring a curated selection of essays, interviews, reviews, conversations, and other pieces that seem especially worth preserving.
Browse restored Teeming Brain pieces â
INTERVIEWS:
It's all a matter of personal pathology: An interview with Thomas Ligotti
Conducted and first published July 2006
Published just weeks after The Teeming Brain began, this email conversation explores Ligottiâs writing process, the role of pain and anhedonia in his work, what he seeks in fiction, and the perfect world he can imagine.
ESSAYS AND REFLECTIONS:
Whatâs so horrific about religion (and religious about horror)?
Originally published June 27, 2011 · Revised and substantially expanded September 2026
A return to my longstanding preoccupation with the intimate relationship between horror and religion, now incorporating the reader conversation that followed the original essay, my experiences with sleep paralysis and the daemon muse, and fifteen years of further reflection on consciousness, identity, and waking up.
Matt Cardin
About The Teeming Brain
The Teeming Brain was the home for my writing on the web for 16 years, from 2006 to 2022. It served as a blog, an essay site, an interview repository, a collaborative publication, and an evolving intellectual and creative laboratory.
Its focus was never easy to reduce to a single category. I created it for the express purpose of encompassing all of my interests; hence, its tagline "Channeling the multiverse of ideas." The site ranged across religion and spirituality, horror and speculative fiction, creativity and the daimonic muse, consciousness and culture, books and film, technology and education, and the strange borderlands where these subjects overlap. It also focused my raging fascination during the early decades of the current millennium, like a magnetism for the soul, with intimations of apocalyptic collapse and a dystopian future. For many years its secondary motto captured the overarching and underlying ethos: Read widely. See broadly. Think deeply.
Looking back, TTB was much more than just a series of blog posts. It became one of the central formative experiences of my life as a writer. Through it, I found readers, friends, collaborators, colleagues, and opportunities that shaped much of what followed. Just as importantly, writing and editing that site over all those years helped me discover and articulate many of the subjects that have continued to occupy my books and essays ever since.
