was born in Brunswick, Maine in 1948. His
family moved a lot when he was young, but he eventually ended up attending Brunswick High School with master of the macabre himself, Stephen King who was a year ahead of Mark.
Mark grew up in a musical family. His father would let him play along while at weekend gigs and gatherings. Mark learned to play guitar by watching guitarists' fingers. The Beatles and the Stones happened and 
Mark fell in love with rock and roll and joined his first band as a singer and guitar player at the age of fifteen. At sixteen, he formed a family band with his brother on bass and his cousin on rhythm.
Mark's love for fiction and especially his love of
anything to do with the macabre always burned in him. His grandmother, who lived with him during his formative years, was a psychic, a medium, and a great story teller. He sat mesmerized for hours on end while she told tales - most of which she professed were true - of the supernatural.
Mark began reading at a young age and became a voracious consumer of anything that went bump in the night. He read Weird Tales and Dracula and I am Legend, He watched The Twilight Zone and went to see all the Poe-pictures. You get the drift. He loved the stuff. But reading and movies haven't been his only excursions into the unknown. He's lived in several haunted houses, has had a
multitude of psychic experiences, and believes that as a child he was kidnapped by aliens. (There's a time-debt thing that he just can't seem to get past.)
He supposes it was inevitable that he became a storyteller. As a child, he made stories up by the dozens and told them to anyone who would listen. Mostly 
the scary, off-the-wall stuff, of course.
He decided to become a novelist at the tender age of eighteen, but life got in the way. He continued with his music career by playing in bands as well as writing and performing his own songs. He even owned a recording studio.
At about the age of forty, he started from scratch and began writing novels. Part time, of course, but he soon discovered that it was his true calling and that he'd just succumbed to it a little later than most.
He has written five novels plus about 50 short stories and several novellas. Wasps, his first published story, appeared in Raven's Tale Magazine in 1995. He has included it in his collection, SERVANTS OF DARKNESS.
His newest publications include a novella, THE HAUNTING OF SAM CABOT, and an epic novel, THE LOST VILLAGE. Both published by Damnation Books.
