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Mark Samuels was born in 1967 in Clapham, south London. He grew up in Crystal Palace. He was a failure at school, taking little or no interest in classes and preferred to spend his time in Anerley library, reading science-fiction and horror. His first job was as an outdoor clerk for a firm of solicitors in Craven Street, close to Charing Cross Station. During this period he became familiar with the Inns of Court and the streets around Fleet Street. What he saw of the legal profession, however, convinced him that solicitors and barristers are societal vampires, and he quit his job after a year. For the next few years he was forced to work as an export clerk in a seedy south London record shop which shall remain nameless. By 1989 he was working for (at the time very bizarre) Foyles Bookshop in the Charing Cross Road before obtaining employment at Samuel French Ltd, the theatrical booksellers and leasing agents, which is where he works to this day. His first attempts at fiction were made in his teens, and were derived from horror movies shown on late-night television. In 1988 the magazine BACK BRAIN RECLUSE published “Caught in the Rain”, which marked Samuels’ initial appearance in print as an author. Thereafter he had half-a-dozen stories appear in small press magazines during the early 1990s, but most importantly in DEMENTIA 13. However, shortly after D13 went under, so did Samuels. After repeated rejections from leading small press magazines such as PSYCHOTROPE and PEEPING TOM, he stopped writing fiction altogether and dropped out of the British horror scene. In 1999 he was living alone in a ground floor studio flat behind a Victorian pile in Stamford Hill, north London when he began to write again. This second period of writing proved markedly more successful than the first one, and, during the next few years, Samuels’ work achieved publication in some of the most prestigious anthologies in the horror genre. He came to receive enthusiastic praise from the likes of Thomas Ligotti, TED Klein, Ramsey Campbell, S.T. Joshi, Stephen Jones, John Pelan and Ellen Datlow. In 2004 he married Adriana Diaz-Enciso, and they now live in a cramped apartment not far from Highgate Underground Station. He may be contacted via email at mark@marksamuels.net. |
