Dark Awakenings
It is refreshing to see that there are still authors interested in and capable of portraying a species of dread that is dependent neither on the standard bogeymen of horror fiction nor in pain and the thread of bodily dissolution as ends in themselves....The philosophical and theological bases for Cardin's horror run deep....[He brings] his ideas to vivid, immediate life through his excellent descriptive skills, believable characters, well-described settings, and an unusually apt gift for choosing metaphors when attempting to describe the ineffable....In "Teeth," comparative religion, philosophy, and quantum mechanics meet in a mandala that offers the clearest expression of Azathoth as the universal maw since Lovecraft. Perhaps even more devastating is "The God of Foulness," which posits a cult based on the incarnation through disease of the third god in an unholy trinity, served by a text riddled with redirected, misquoted, and parodied extracts from the world's spiritual texts. Cardin's ability to detail the full implications of ideas that utterly destroy "the human need for illusion" reveals the forces behind those ideas in action, without risking anticlimax, and demonstrates the impact they have on the lives of characters in whom readers can recognize themselves; this lends the stories a terrific impact --Jim Rockhill,Dead Reckonings#7, Spring 2010--Dead Reckonings #7, 2010