Mark R Faulkner

This novella is a real horror if your an arachnophobe! I loved the writing in this one.

Infested

Amazon.com Infested

My Review - 

This book begins with an idyllic canoeing holiday starting in the early morning when the world is yours alone. The writing here is observant, beautiful, and the reader floats along with it. The reason the man is there comes as a shock. The world comes to its knees and it appears very few humans survive an incursion from space. We watch Michael's struggle to reach London, then the coast, hoping to find he isn't the only survivor.

This book is to all intents a classic apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic story but it differs in that it is concerned with an individual and not the whole of humanity. I found it beautifully written and I enjoyed it very much.

Mark R Faulkner

Mark Faulkner writes these stories so engagingly.  There's horror but there are flashes of sensitivity and understanding which highlight and contrast.  Lovely stuff.

The Dark Stone

Amazon.com The Dark Stone

My review - 

This is the story of Sam who was a survivor of a terrible plague which killed all his family and almost everyone in his small town. He was befriended by another young boy, Joshua and eventually taken away by a group of monks with whom he found a happy and peaceful life. A couple of years later the monastery was sacked and Sam was the only survivor. As he escaped, he took a dark stone with him, which gradually but inexorably altered his behaviour. 

The writing is fluent and descriptive and I loved the away the story flowed. The author is able to describe both beauty and horror and to evoke both disgust and pity. This is sensitive horror. I felt for Sam as he had to cope with the death of all those he loved, and later as he found his own actions were beyond his control. I felt his anguish as he lost his innocence and fell prey to the power of The Dark Stone. A great story with its own built-in horror.

Mark R Faulkner

Mark writes in the Horror genre and this one is a cracker.

Flux

Amazon.com  Flux

My review -

In this remarkable first novel, Mark Faulkner creates a situation in which his main character Iain, a head injury victim, finds himself flicking from the present to a parallel nightmare reality. I didn't warm to the character initially but as the novel progressed I was really on Iain's side. After his accident his neuro-surgeon's main interest in his case was to try to make her own name in medical circles. The hospital chaplain wanted to find proof of an afterlife from Iain's near-death experience to bolster his own flagging faith. Iain, in increasing despair and distress, only has the elusive Eve on his side.

There is a real sense of hellish other-world here and poor Iain is, as the title implies, in a state of flux between here and there, with sometimes one 'reality' superimposed on the other. Iain's reading of the bible, given to him by the chaplain, leads him to a sense of good and evil, and the feeling he is being forced against his will to choose evil.

Mark Faulkner has created a realistic and believable story and one wonders whether this could happen as a result of an injury to the brain, that most complex and mysterious of organs. The ending is horrifying and in some senses, inevitable.

I really hope Mark has more work of this quality up his sleeve. He is an author to watch and has one keen fan already!