Table of Contents

Introduction: The Path to Nowhere

1. Piercing the Cosmological Horizon

2. Thomas Ligotti: The Poetics of Darkness

3. Georges Bataille: Opening Up the Infinite

4. E. M. Cioran: The Horror of Being Oneself

Afterword: The Mystical Death of the Speculative Critic

About the Author

Brad Baumgartner is assistant teaching professor of English at Penn State University.

Reviews

Brad Baumgartner's Weird Mysticism moves with freedom through three modern heretics: the irreal hell of Thomas Ligotti, the impossible purgatory of Georges Bataille, and the pessimal paradise of E. M. Cioran. The music that emerges is a quiet friendly imperative to laugh in the face of the void and an indelible new vision of the inevitable impossibility of writing itself.

This genuinely interdisciplinary study skilfully weaves together common threads of thought from a range of sources across different literatures and periods, and it places them convincingly in a continuum of 'weird mysticism'. While the book's inquiry emerges from the pessimistic tradition, Baumgartner refuses to be morose, identifying an authentic sense of ecstatic uplift in the ostensibly horrific or transgressive literary works under discussion.