Mark hardly needs an introduction — this is his 6th collection of short stories following on from 2016’s instantly sold-out “Written in Darkness”. This book contains the following stories:
“Decay”
“An End to Perpetual Motion”
“Moon Blood Red – Tide Turning”
“The Crimson Fog”
“The Court of Midnight”
“In the Complex”
All six stories — the middle one a novelette — are interconnected by a common thread. The story “In the Complex” will be first published here and “The Crimson Fog”, arguably this collection’s centerpiece, has not been published in this form elsewhere either.
S.T. Joshi wrote about Mark and this book: “He has a sure grasp of the psychology of terror, knowing exactly what hints and details are likely to trigger in the reader the sense of unease and ‘wrongness’ that is the essence of the weird. His prose is fluid, richly textured, and at times hypnotic, whether he is dealing with contemporary phenomena or those of the historical past. A number of the stories in this book have a kind of European ambiance, recalling the themes and atmosphere of such writers as Jean Ray and Stefan Grabinski. But they nonetheless remain highly original, reflecting Samuels’s own concerns about our hapless position in a universe we cannot hope to understand and enmeshed in societal norms that are just as incomprehensible.”