Mark Samuels RIP

Yesterday, following view of THIS notification about his unexpected and untimely death, I wrote the words below in various public places…

“This is an enormous shock to me. I had not met up with Mark for some years, but we were friends in the late 1980s / early 1990s, in the South London area, often meeting up in various pubs along with two or three other people. He was very young then.  I shall write something more substantial in due course after processing this very very sad news. RIP Mark.”

Having slept on it, I realise that since those earlier years I know little about Mark, nor do I fully understand some of his later beliefs or actions, but I hold a great affection for my memory of him as well as being grateful for his enthusiasm and his then already big genre knowledge as a beneficial influence (during those earlier years) upon me, even though I was seemingly twenty years older than him!

But now, I can only really know his published work. My gestalt real-time reviews of his work have long been linked from HERE. I hope these reviews can contribute, in their small way, towards a fuller appreciation of his great canon of weird literature, and the durable legacy it deserves.  A pure ‘Posterity’. 

May 704 be with him.

***

Some more personal memories:

From the mid eighties, the stapled small press horror magazines to which he wrote letters profusely, and then publishing me in his own magazine ‘The Stygian Dreamhouse’, eventually creating circumstances for us to meet. I remember driving him in a car from South London to Leeds for a convention, where he was not too impressed with my driving! My story ‘Small Talk’ in ‘Weirdmonger’ was based on this event. ‘Don’t turn left on Sydenham Road!’ I can still hear him saying intently several times. Also some wonderful magical memories entailed him and myself and usually two others wandering more than once around London whereby he showed us, inter alia, the Machen sights. And I am also grateful for the part he played in my surprise 50th birthday party in London in 1998. And I was proud to be disguised as a character in his novella ‘The Face of Twilight’ and maybe also in some of his other works. Finally, for any interested, HERE is a full copy of Mark’s substantive article ‘Brewing Up With Des Lewis’ about the occasion when he visited me, my wife and my children in Coulsdon, an article that appeared in the DFL ‘Dagon’ special in 1989 and includes a photograph of us. I am not sure his driving was any better than mine.

PS: Also, I had a story included in the Mark Samuels tribute book anthology in more recent years. And my very first gestalt real-time review in 2008 was triggered by his collection ‘Glyphotech’.