Mark N. Drake (he/him) was born in 1964, which is starting to sound like a long time ago! He was always an avid reader and in his teens very much into TTRPG, but his initial academic interest was physics. He got a degree in Applied Physics and went to do research work at what was then the Royal Aircraft Establishment. After a few years of that, he moved into University management. All the while he kept trying to write, but life kept getting in the way! Then in 2019 he decided to give it one last go; he dug out some old ideas from the 80’s, made himself write at least something each day and a few months later – pretty much as the pandemic hit – he had his first novel! Nowadays he’s semi-retired and splitting his time between County Durham and the South of France, writing when he can.
Author Links:
Website: markndrake.com
Shards of Shattered Darkness: Amazon Link
Bogganmor: Amazon Link
Bluesky: @mark-n-drake.bsky.social
We’re here to spotlight two of your works – a collection of short stories, Shards of Shattered Darkness, and the fifth in your Lovecraftian/Weird Fiction Darkisle mystery series, Bogganmor. What is it that draws you to write weird fiction, and can you share some of your influences for these stories?
I was very into my D&D as a callow youth – then someone came along to the games evening with something called Call of Cthulhu. I was instantly hooked and set about finding as many books by Lovecraft, Derleth, Ashton Smith etc. as I could. I found myself very drawn to that early-20th Century vibe and ended up collecting all sorts of non-fictional resources from the time, which ended up being very useful when I came to research my Darkisle novels! I also read other horror, of course, but my first love was actually sci-fi, which I still dabble in occasionally.
Do you feel your background in physics and Higher Education has influenced/prepared you or inspired you in terms of the horror themes you write? If so, how?
Higher Education has certainly informed my writing. From the outset of my Darkisle series I wanted to create a sort of British version of Miskatonic University. I called it the University of Mercia and based it at Buxton. In Bogganmor, it really starts to come to fruition. I feel pretty comfortable writing about academia, so it features in a few of my short stories too. As for physics, I think it’s not much of a leap from that to cosmic horror. “You’re telling me there’s a vast, ancient, terrifying, doomed universe that is indifferent to humanity? That… yeah, that’s physics.”
Let’s start with Shard of Shattered Darkness. Tell us a little bit about this collection, and how you came to arrange these 18 stories in it – are they connected by theme, are they purely eclectic, what was your editorial process for their order and inclusion?
After my third Darkisle novel I fancied a break from all that plotting and decided to write a few short stories. But first I revisited some old ones – stretching right back to my early attempts in the 80’s – and thought some of them were a lot better than I remembered them! So, I brushed them off, in one case converted it into a Darkisle story, and decided to make them the core of a collection.
As they were written over such a long period of time there was no deliberate overarching theme, but they did fall into categories: stories inspired by the seasons, stories with a sort-of X Files feel to them, sci-fi horror stories and so on. So that informed the new stories I wrote for the collection.
The categories suggested their own order, which was more-or-less chronological; a historical action/horror story first, then on through contemporary to sci-fi. The exception being the four Darkisle stories, which I placed at the end in the optimistic hope they would inspire people to immediately seek out a Darkisle novel!
If you had to highlight 2-3 themes in the collection, what would they be, and how have you expressed them in the stories?
To my own surprise, I came to realise how many times – when I was looking for some inspiration – I ended up turning to music. It didn’t click until I was writing an ‘About These Stories’ bit at the back of the collection. I kept that passage in, which I typed as it occurred to me, as it seemed sort of fun!
As I mentioned before, the long gestation period of the collection pretty much precludes one unifying theme. But I suppose one notion that crops up a lot, in different forms, is identity. Sometimes it’s in the structure of the story – is it about who you think it’s about? And sometimes it’s about looking at something fundamental about human identity – both in the sense of asking what makes us human, and can we ever cross a line that means we’re not, but also in the more paranoid sense of “just what am I talking to here?”
Let’s move on to Bogganmor, Book 5 in the Darkisle series. Can readers start here, and still get into the situation and the series?
I hope new readers can dive in here, I’ve certainly tried for that. Yes, you’ll be aware that there are things that happened in earlier books that are being picked up in Bogganmor, but I hope I’ve done enough make it easy to get the gist of things. It helps that I use a Prologue in all my Darkisle novels; I know that’s quite old-fashioned but they are meant to be the journals of someone born in 1890, so I think that’s allowed! A Prologue is a great place to hide some “bringing up to speed” in!
How did you come up with Darkisle? What influences did you draw upon to create it, and how has this setting developed as the series progressed?
I’d been messing around with Cthulhu Mythos-inspired plot ideas since the 80’s – some for short stories, some for RPG scenarios. Plus, I’d done a lot of background research into the period. From 2011 onwards these ideas started to coalesce into RPG resources for a fictional location. I published these with a friend of mine under the banner of DRAKAT Games.
Parallel to that I was toying with the idea of using my home county of Derbyshire as a setting for supernatural stories, particularly the Peak District. The trouble is, I wanted some physical isolation and the Peak District isn’t all that remote. You can get there pretty easily from Manchester, Sheffield, Derby, etc. So, I decided I needed to invent somewhere – well, why not just use Darkisle and develop it as a location for fiction, not just a game resource? Since then, the place has developed a lot in my mind – and on the page. I feel quite at home mentally walking down the streets and lanes of much of the island now!
I often base its towns and villages on real places: Port Cattrick is based on Whitby, Carnven on Seaham Harbour, Seaview on Filey, and so on. As well as my desk research, I used to work at Beamish Museum, so I feel very at home writing about pubs, cars, shops, clothes – and how society was – in the 1920s.
In terms of the overall feel of the place, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have Summer Isle from The Wicker Man in mind! But you can add in other influences too – Julian Simpson’s Pleasant Green universe, any of those rural areas people unwisely visit in Hammer Horror films… even Royston Vasey!
Tell us about Jack Glennison, the main character. What was your process for developing him, did you have a clear arc in mind for the whole series, or has he surprised you throughout the books?
I think a detective is a good way to lead an audience into a very different place – think Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks or Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man. And as he’s our route into Darkisle, I wanted Jack to be very rational, methodical, sensible. To start with, at least! But he also needed to be open to the weirdness, so I gave him some backstory that would allow for that. In a nod to the fact that Darkisle supplanted the Peak District as my location, I made him a native of Derbyshire.
I do have a clear arc in mind for him – it’s foreshadowed very clearly in the Prologue of the first novel, so I don’t have much room for manoeuvre there. I’m constantly trying to calibrate the change in him from the person he starts out as to the person who wrote that first Prologue, and if there’s one thing that constantly worries me about the series, it’s getting that journey right.
So, no; as Jack’s arc is the most planned thing in the series, he can’t really surprise me much. Which is good as the other characters do so all the time! Honestly, the amount of plot tweaks caused by some character developing an unplanned personality… don’t get me started!
Can you tell us about your future publication plans? What can we look out for next?
For now, I’m pressing on with Darkisle! I was in France for a lot of 2024 and took the opportunity to research the sixth book there (a bit of a spoiler for where some of the action will be!).
Right now, I’m working on the backstories of several characters and their predecessors to make sure everything is watertight for the Big Reveals to come. Who knows, maybe I’ll get the next one out by the end of the year, but I think early 2026 is likelier.
After that, I think I’d like to see the series to its conclusion – I have an endpoint in mind and it’s tied to a real-life event, so there’s no wriggle room there! I’m definitely nearer the end of the series than the start of it.
Once the series is finished, I might go back to short-form fiction for a while. Or maybe one of my old failed sci-fi novels might be worth a revisit.
Plus, I have an idea for a psychological horror supernatural thriller type thing that I am really excited about but that needs to be tackled when I have less distractions.
Quick answer: more Darkisle, and then stuff!
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