Mark Cantrell
A coffee-guzzling journalist turned author, Mark Cantrell has chased the literary dream for years.
Somehow, it's always managed to stay one step ahead, but Mark perseveres in his pursuit all the same. There are worse ways to kill time, after all.
Mark is the author of two novels (so far), both released in paperback and digital editions by the indie press, Inspired Quill.
Both his novels haunt dystopian ground, but aside from their dark tone they remain very different beasts.
While CITIZEN ZERO (2017) runs towards political science fiction thriller, SILAS MORLOCK (2013) ventures into the shadows of dark, urban fantasy in homage of literary culture.
For want of comparison, in CITIZEN ZERO The Matrix meets V for Vendetta with a touch of I, Daniel Blake. SILAS MORLOCK, though, is more a macabre melding of Fahrenheit 451 and Nosferatu.
Away from novel-length works, Mark has written plenty of short stories and novelettes in his time. He's even been known to dabble in poetry.
Over the years, his stories have appeared in a variety of small press journals both in print and online.
Way back in 1998, two of his stories were featured in the Clover Books horror anthology, Spirit of Darkness. In 2001 there was Love, Sex, Death & Carrots. More recently, his work appeared in Bards and Sages Publishing's The Society of Misfit Stories Presents, Vol 1, Issue 1 (February 2019).
Between times, his fiction has appeared in publications such as Sci-Fright, Alternaties, Asphalt Jungle, Writers' Muse, the Writers’ Compass, and more. He's even self-published some of these works, individually as 'digital shorts', and in his collection of short fiction, ISOLATION SPACE (2009/2011).
Broadly speaking, Mark's work fits into the science-fiction-fantasy-horror spectrum, but he tends to write to the story and worry about the genre later. It seems to work, more or less. Certainly, he's happy (flattered) to be called a science fiction author.
By trade, Mark is a journalist. This is reflected on his author blog, where he writes articles about politics, society and current affairs, along with regular excursions into science, culture and literary life. Well, it keeps the 'blog-beast' fed.
As a jobbing B2B hack, Mark has mostly written for trade mags. He worked in Manchester for nigh on 15 years, writing about England's social housing industry. A pretty gritty topic, it definitely offered fuel for the dystopian mind.
On a more personal note Mark is a Yorkshireman born and bred in the city of Bradford. These days he lives in Stoke-on-Trent in the Midlands, but he remains a proud Northerner.
Mark studied politics at the University of Liverpool and trained as a journalist at the City University, London. After that, he got distracted writing what would become CITIZEN ZERO when he should have been pursuing his first break in the media. You live and learn. It kind of paid off in the end, though.
The writing bug caught Mark from a curious source. It all began towards the tail end of the 8-bit home computing era, when he crafted a series of text adventure games for the ZX Spectrum 48K and 128K computers.
Mark even won an award for one of those games, which led to them all being picked up and released by indie adventure game stalwart, Zenobi Software – itself an award winning company.
It proved to be a satisfying way of closing that chapter of his life, Mark says, as he went on to embark on a new beginning as an author and journalist.
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Visit his Amazon Author Page.
“In AR, a falling tree makes no sound unless there is a witness to behold the event. Otherwise, it is only a changing pattern in a complex data-stream.”
“Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with ‘opportunities’ by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS.”
“Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. "You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves a purpose. I need my zeros, Eric. They put fear in people; fear of crime and terrorism. They are a stark reminder to the stakeholders that what they despise today, they may end up joining tomorrow. It keeps them obedient. Remember that!”