Grant for one of his Shadows anthologies after meeting him at the British Fantasy Convention in 1987. I sold a couple of stories to small press magazines, and then eventually managed to sell one to Charles L. After a while I started getting good feedback to what I was writing, so decided to devote more time to it. What did you do in those intervening years?Īs I say, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living when I left college, so I got hold of a second-hand typewriter and started writing stories and radio plays to fill in the time waiting for responses to jobs I’d applied for. You graduated in 1984 but didn’t sell your first novel, Toady, until 1988. I’d completed two full-length original Doctor Who novels by the age of twelve (which I’ve still got, hand-written in ring-binder notepads), but it wasn’t really until I graduated from college at the age of twenty-one with no idea what I wanted to for a living that I finally thought: Hmm, maybe I should give this writing lark a proper go? I’d always loved writing stories from a very early age-when other kids were eking out two or three page stories in their exercise books for English homework, I’d happily rattle off fifteen to twenty stories, which would then be read out in class, to the delight of my schoolmates, because it meant they didn’t have to do any work for that lesson.

Was there a point as a child or teenager when you abruptly realized you wanted to make your living writing horror? Morris and his family live in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire.Īs a child, you watched Doctor Who and the Hammer films, and you’ve mentioned both as influences. His most recent releases are the tie-in novel for the Darren Aronofsky film Noah, and Zombie Apocalypse!: Horror Hospital, a stand-alone novel set within the Zombie Apocalypse! world created by editor Stephen Jones. After PanMacmillan passed on his next novel, Morris found success in writing Doctor Who and Torchwood tie-ins, editing nonfiction anthologies of film essays, and contributing short fiction to dozens of anthologies. Morris,” to reflect the book’s female protagonist. Morris changed his name to the gender-neutral “J. His 2002 novel Fiddleback was acquired by PanMacmillan and received a significant advance from Random House for an American release . . . When his fourth novel, The Secret of Anatomy, was published by HarperCollins in 1995, he was being called “the new Clive Barker,” but his next few novels were victims of a serious downturn in horror. Mark Morris has been a major figure on the British horror scene since 1989, when Toady, the first of his sixteen novels, was published to critical acclaim and solid sales (the 1990 paperback release debuted at number seven on the bestseller list).

Doctor Who by Mark Morris