Divinations of the Deep

The Hebrew scriptures tell us that when God began his work of creation "the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep (tehom)". If, as Matt Cardin suggests, tehom derives from the Sumerian Tiamat, the primeval chaos dragon of Babylonian mythology, then tehom, the deep, is a primeval chaos fashioned by God into an ordered cosmos. We may speculate, therefore, that tehom, like Tiamat, predated God: that God may even be the offspring of the deep. If such were true, then we would be forced to conclude that both God and his world — the ordered world of life, light, and logic — exist against a background of death, darkness, and derangement. A few scattered souls claim that we can glimpse this primal chaos even now, while the cosmic charade still runs its course. At the seams of the universe, they say, a thread will sometimes become unraveled; a ray of darkness will shine through; and the light does not overcome it. Divinations of the Deep presents five such glimpses, which the reader receives at his own peril. To question the universe in this manner is always dangerous, because there is no way of knowing in advance what form the answers will take. All that is known is that their form will be the unexpected.

"Matt Cardin's horror stories are the real thing: works that are committed to expressing what is irremediably strange and terrible in human existence. They are examples of what compels true seekers of horror to page through miles of magazines, collections, and anthologies in search of a few, or even a single story that speaks to the darkness within us all." – Thomas Ligotti