Episode 41: On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin

Neil Gaiman wrote, "If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water." Flame Tree Publishing underwrites this claim with their recent publication, The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror. The book is a veritable gazetteer of these two cities in the heartland of the imaginal world. Writer and scholar Matt Cardin, founding editor of the marvellous [Teeming Brain](www.teemingbrain.com), wrote a chapter for the book focusing on the books and films of the Sixties and Seventies. In this episode, he joins JF and Phil to discuss the kinship of horror and fantasy, the modern ghettoization of mythopoeic art, the prophetic reach of speculative fiction, and the "cauldron of cultural transformation" that was the Sixties and Seventies.

Header Image by Moralist, Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror
Matt Cardin's website
The Teeming Brain

American literary critic S. T. Joshi
British writer and scholar Roger Luckhurst
Neil Gaiman, introduction to The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death
The concept of "folk psychology"
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"
James Curcio, Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice (forthcoming)
American author Thomas Ligotti
British author Arthur Machen
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Ian McEwen, Enduring Love
Weird Studies, Episode 36: On Hyperstition
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Terry Brooks, The Sword of Shannara
Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)
The Lord of the Rings animated film (Ralph Bakshi, 1978)
Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
The Call of Cthulhu Role-Playing Game (Chaosium)
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History
Interview with Twilight Zone luminary George Clayton Johnson
The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976)
Stephen King, Salem's Lot

Special Guest: Matt Cardin.