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.

James Machin, Associate Researcher, Birkbeck, University of London

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.

Nicola Masciandaro, Professor of English at Brooklyn College (CUNY)