Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuels

Mark Samuels—“the contemporary British master of visionary weirdness”, as Ramsey Campbell has called him—stands at the forefront of 21st century Horror, combining an unparalleled understanding of the Weird Fiction tradition with his own modern take on cosmic dread. An acknowledged influence on numerous writers in the field, his stories depict the isolation and despair of urban life giving way to vistas of universal alienation and, on occasion, spiritual transcendence.

Now, in this collection of original works inspired by Samuels’ writing, his characteristic themes are extended into previously undreamt-of settings: the hull of a Russian nuclear submarine headed to the heart of Chaos; the compound of a Japanese death cult with designs on the human race; a hospital run by the Men with Paper Faces; the Crying Rooms of London’s secret Reverse; the far reaches of the collapsed future and even the private thoughts of St. John of the Cross. Fed by the “strange tales” of the 19th and 20th centuries but firmly rooted in the present, Marked to Die is a digest of urban terror shot through with intimations of a monstrous Sublime.