Mark Samuels – лучшие книги

During the height of the London Blitz, book-cataloguer Saul Prior is offered work in the recondite library of the reclusive, ancient, and titled line of the Degabastons. He is summoned to medieval Thool Abbey – the degenerate family's ill-gotten ancestral seat – situated in a blighted valley in the far reaches of the Hertfordshire countryside. But if Prior had envisaged a bookish refuge from the warring outside world, what he instead encounters proves to be a nightmarish, inescapable, occult conspiracy. Its central horror has waxed hideously through long centuries, having manifested elsewhere in the form of “The White Hands”. Now the quintessential delineation of this self-same, soul-destroying, evil lore is fully revealed in the Gothic novel "Witch-Cult Abbey“.

Cryptic and potent languages, bizarre cults, mysteries that span the gulf between life and death, occult influences that reverberate through history like a dying echo, irresistible cosmic decay, forces of nightmare that distort reality itself, gateways to worlds where esoteric knowledge rots the future. Here, from Mark Samuels, the author of 'Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes' and modern exemplar of mystical horror, is a collection of tales that forms a veritable Rosetta Stone for scholars of cosmic wonder and terror.

This is the first collection of strange stories by contemporary writer Mark Samuels. The themes that thread through these nine accomplished stories are drawn from the great tradition of the twentieth-century weird tale, and they are suffused with a distinctly cosmopolitan, European feel. Mark Samuels writes about the fundamental fears of modern life, especially the effects of isolation and the dislocation that city dwellers can experience in their inhospitable, man-made environment. H.P. Lovecraft wrote about entities beyond human comprehension that might be summoned from beyond the stars, but did he ever consider that they would feel quite at home in the sodium glare of some run-down inner-city? When one of Samuels’s characters stands alone looking up at the vast, illimitable darkness of space, the reader is forced to wonder if there is much difference between the hopeless emptiness of eternity and the bleak interstices between the concrete and steel of their daily life?

In the introduction to this collection Ramsey Campbell states that the two modern masters of urban weirdness are Thomas Ligotti and Mark Samuels. Inside this book you will find weird things indeed, not least the likes of:

The fungus-riddled mannequin in the lunatic asylum

The reconstruction company that works with life and death

The legal nightmare where the sane are guilty

A horror writing convention taken over by black magic cannibals

The Punch and Judy show broadcast live after death

The strange fate of the reincarnation of H.P. Lovecraft