This is another bit of Samuels’ fiction I got through his Patreon page.

Review: “Caught in the Rain”, Mark Samuels, 1988. 

This was Samuels first story and published in Black Brain Recluse #11 and, as a mature writer, he’s certainly aware of its faults.

It’s a little too vague and has a theme of environmental apocalypse. 

The plot is simple. 

The story’s protagonist, and its only character, is waiting for a bus in a deluge with excessive lightening. When he gets on the bus, he is filled with dread. There is a bit of overwriting here with a metaphor that doesn’t work – “droplets streaming along the window like transparent maggots”. 

He gets off at his regular stop and sees no one, but the location is alienating, unfamiliar. The lights in buildings seem distant. There is trash everywhere. He has the feeling of somehow being pursued. His heart begins to beat heavily. The branches of swaying trees seem to claw at him. There is a horrendous flash of lightening, and the rain becomes monsoon like. 

I’m a member of Mark Samuels’ Patreon account and have access to various Samuels works. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to review his unpublished works, drafts, and alternate versions of published stories. However, from time to time, I’ll review some works I’ve come across there that have been published.

Review: “Amelia”, Mark Samuels, 1994. 

This is an early version from 1994 of what would become “The White Hands”. It was published in the magazine Black Altars. 

As Samuels notes on his Patreon page, it’s notable difference is a theme  aligning more towards “Poe-like Romanticism” than “The White Hands”. 

Most of the incidents are similar except, unlike the longer version of “The White Hands”, the narrator doesn’t visit Lilith Blake’s tomb. Indeed, there isn’t a Lilith Blake in this story but a very similar writer: Amelia Jefferys aka Henry Priestly. Muswell, when speaking of Jefferys, says

supernatural isolation when confronted with infinity, the sense of eternal loss and a love which cannot be consummated constitute the romantic impulse

as Edgar Allan Poe knew. 

And the narrator, once he sees Jefferys’ picture, falls in love with her. He takes steps to have Jefferys’ coffin exhumed and gaze upon her “supple and youthful” neck. While we hear of the narrator, named John Harrington, writing to Lilith Blake at the end of “The White Hands”, here we get a letter from Harrington to Jefferys.

Review: “The Interminable Abomination”, Mark Samuels, 2021. 

Sometimes, if you’re a protagonist in a Mark Samuels story, trouble just finds you – corruption propagating back from the future or another dimension or the dead taking over the world or taking a job in some monstrous company or just going to the hospital. And another common way of finding trouble is to be a book collector or literary scholar. In the first case, the horrors discovered are generally apocalyptic. In the second case, it’s a more personal horror.

This is a story of the second kind.

Our narrator is a semi-retired bookseller operating in London for 30 years. He’s felt the usual vicissitudes of the business: internet competition and gentrification pushing out the spaces to conduct retail at. And lugging boxes of books around has wrecked his back. He produces a quarterly mail order catalog called Vathek’s Book-List. He specializes in horror works and now finds himself under a compulsion to write an account of his life which is also a horror story. 

One day he gets a call from Colonel Archibald Dawson, a long-time customer of his though he’s never met the man since he orders by mail. He knows Dawson has bought some good stuff from him over the years, so he’ll actually go to Dawson’s house to see what he has to sell. 

I’ll be returning to Brian Stableford’s Sexual Chemistry shortly, but the usual method of operation at this blog is that the “literary reconnaissances” are posted in the order of observation, and I finished this book before Stableford’s.

As a reminder, posts marked “essay” contain extensive spoilers.

Essay: The Prozess Manifestations, Mark Samuels, 2019.

Samuels is not generally a weird fiction writer associated with a “mythos”. However, if you read enough Samuels, you realize some of his work is a constellation of stories around his fictional Victorian writer Lilith Blake and the area around London’s Highgate Cemetery.

And then there’s the series of stories in this book, most referencing a Doctor Prozess. But it’s not a mythos linked by plot or place or a chronology. Rather Prozess, as we’ll see, is more a symbol, and avatar of deeper forces and drives in our lives.

I’ll be looking at the stories in order, and some I’ve looked at before.

“Decay“ has a setup reminiscent of an early William Gibson cyberpunk story since its protagonist, Carlos Diaz, is hired by the grotesquely fat Hermes X (a name suggestive of a seeker of magical secrets) to spy on one Cornelius Parry. Parry is a former researcher in artificial intelligence (I suspect the name “Parry” is an allusion to an early artificial intelligence program that simulated the personality of a paranoid schizophrenic) whose researches seem to have continued and yielded fruit.

Low Res Scan: Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes, Mark Samuels, 2008, 2016.

Processes are those legal, political, technological, bureaucratic, and scientific things that define our modern world, a world Mark Samuels is not fond of. So it’s no accident that the very word process shows up in this collection’s title. I’ll eventually be looking at another work of Samuels’ called The Prozess Manifestations.

As befitting the “Low Res Scan” designation, I won’t be reviewing “Sentinels”, “Cesare Thodol: Some Lines Written on a Wall”, “Ghorla”, “Regina vs. Zoskia”, and “A Gentleman from Mexico” since I’ve looked at them already in my post on The Age of Decayed Futurity. This is a variant edition of Samuels’ 2008 Glypotech collection sans “The Cannibal Kings of Horror”, a satire story he deemed “wholly undertaken by even more outlandish developments”.

Psychotropic drugs had dulled its effects to the extent that he was almost able to ignore the surrender of the human race to this phenomenon of sham. But the medication only produced neutrality; one more means of ensuring his tacit compliance if not his participation. Early on, when he first recognised the all-pervasive nature of the sham-existence, he had talked to others about it. However, they did not seem to realise that all apparent solutions were equally part of the problem. Science, psychology, religion and philosophy were likewise only manifestations. There seemed only one viable way to circumvent the circus that is sham-existence: annihilation.

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Low Res Scan: The White Hands and Other Weird Tales, Mark Samuels, 2003.

Samuels’ horrors frequently involve contagions both mental and physical. His characters are often socially isolated and, eventually, mentally isolated. His stories rarely involve solitary monsters but the intrusion or revelation of some group breaking into our world from the future, another dimension, or even underground to bring some horrible corruption upon us. Sometimes his characters’ alienation is a spiritual and physical wound inflicted by modernity, particularly in its manifestation in the modern office. If they seek transcendent revelation, it can be a dangerous and futile quest.

In “The Grandmaster’s Final Game” perfecting the play of chess takes on theological elements. One day Reverend Mooney is contemplating the chess problems he’s going to work on when his slow day taking confessions ends. But then in walks Leonard Hughes, a man with an eidetic memory who has given himself over to perfecting his chess game and developing his own strategy and style rather than just playing gambits from historical games he’s memorized. Hughes has a strange story and a stranger question: what if there are men so wicked that even Hell won’t take them.