Mark Souza's Blog

Why horror? I started my reading life as a fan of writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway, and read almost everything they'd written. It's a sad thing to come to the end of a favorite author's works with the knowledge there's nothing more and never will be.


My brother was a Stephen King fan who'd been after me for years to read King's books. He also played Dungeons and Dragons. I found it easy to dismiss the advice of a man who thinks he's a wizard.


Then I read Misery and was blown away. Don't ask me what hair crawled up my gluteus maximus, because I honestly can't recall the reason I took the plunge. I became a big fan, not of horror, but of Stephen King. The man can flat out write. He is an American master and would be no matter what his genre.


Do I read a lot of other horror writer's? Not more than any other genre. I occasionally read Dean Koontz, or J.A. Konrath, not because it's horror, but because they can really write. I am a fan of great writing, not genre. I'll take it wherever I can find it. I've been blown away by Markus Zusak, Elizabeth Rosner, Sara Gruen, Margaret Atwood, and Lee Child, to name a few.


So if it wasn't Stephen King, why do I write horror? The honest truth is, in my efforts to get short stories published, horror publishers offered more opportunities, though it went beyond that. The horror community was welcoming and encouraging. I developed a good relationship with a wonderful publisher, Pill Hill Press (sadly no longer in business). I found the themes for their anthologies inspired creativity in me. I owed them. They gave me my start, and I will always be indebted.


Horror is more than gore and chills. If it's done well, it explores relationships and the human condition. And when it does scare us, it reminds us how much we want to live. No matter what life has done to us or how bad the day has gone, when the mastiff-sized spider crawls from beneath the storm drain we'll run for all we're worth. Why? Because when all is said and done, we really do want to see the sun come up tomorrow. Horror reminds us of that. It makes us grateful - "No spiders today. No spiders today."


Will I only write horror? I don't think so. I have a lot of other things to say. Will I continue to write horror? You betcha. Be afraid. It's good for both of us.

This is a bit long, but please read to the end so you can be prepared should this happen to you.

So we had a little adventure in the Souza household this morning. It’s custom in our house that on Saturdays I make my wife breakfast in bed. Sundays I get breakfast in bed. This morning, looking at what I had at hand, I decided to try something new. I cut slices of French bread, smeared a layer of hummus on, slices of fresh tomato over that, topped it off with mozzarella and put under the broiler (it turned out to be delicious, by the way).

When checking to make sure it wouldn’t burn, I noticed the top element had caught fire. I turned the broiler off. The element kept burning. A small chunk of the element remained orange with heat. I figured once power was removed, it would eventually cool and go out. It then brightened white hot and spit sparks like a sparkler. I figured it must still be getting current somehow. I took a wooden spoon and gave it a few whacks figuring the part that had already burned must be brittle from the heat, and if I could break the element, it would break the circuit. I was successful. A small segment broke away and smacked down on the bottom of the oven with a metallic clank – circuit broken.

And still the element burned and sparked, inching along slow but sure.

Next, I tried to pull the element out. The bottom element plugs into a socked and easily comes out for cleaning. Not the broiler element. It’s hard mounted into the stove. There are holes in the back wall where it penetrates and presumably connects to power. I could foresee that in half an hour or so, the element, like a very slow fuse, would burn through the holes, hit some insulation material and wiring and we’d have ourselves an honest to God house fire.

I grabbed some window cleaner, the first non-flammable liquid at hand, and sprayed down the white hot portion hoping if I could lower the temperature enough, it couldn’t ignite the metal ahead of it, and the fire would stop. It didn’t. At first the color of the metal dulled and it seemed like it might work, however the orange glow quickly picked up intensity to white hot and it started sparking again.

I ran to the garage and grabbed a pair of channel lock pliers, grabbed the element and bent it downward. I then filled a glass bowl with water and submerged the burning end. It sizzled and cooled, and for a moment looked like it had gone out. Then a glow emerged from beneath the water and even submerged it continued to burn like a road flare. It was worse than a nightmare. Like Jason Vooohees from Friday the 13th, there was no stopping it.

I ran back to the garage and grabbed a pair of industrial tin snips. The element is about a quarter inch thick, more than these snips were designed to deal with. I latched on about four inches ahead of the blaze and gave it all I have squeezing with both hands. The snips managed creep through the metal, and burning portion of the element hit the bottom of the stove. I grabbed it with the pliers, ran it to the back door, and hucked it onto the lawn. Disaster averted.

I’ve never heard of this happening before, but obviously it can, so just be aware. As far as I know, all elements are made with this material and counter my own preconceptions, it can burn. The other warning is that if this does happen to you, you can’t put it out. I was lucky. I happened to have a tool capable of cutting through the element. Most people won’t. And even with that tool, I was barely able to manage it and I’m a pretty big strong guy. The right thing to do would have been to close the oven door and call the fire department, which is something all of us are capable of, and what I should have done.

The good news is nobody was hurt, and the toast was perfectly cooked before the element decided to go haywire. So now it’s off to buy a new stove.

I went to the gym for the first time in what seems like decades only to discover an ugly truth, that I now have the upper body strength of an eight year-old boy – you know, the scrawny kid who splits his free time between flute lessons and trips to the allergist. After about an hour, I went in search of my wife to give her the can-we-go-home-now look. She was on one of those machines that works obscure muscle groups no one knows they have (and it’s better that way). I sat on the machine next to hers and waited like a vulture, hoping the weight of my stare would speed things along.

The machine I was sitting on worked the inner thighs. You mount the thing spread eagle at an angle so obtuse it causes most men a groin injury just looking at it. You lift a stack of weights by clamping your thighs together. I would venture a bet that I was the first person in possession of a Y-chromosome to ever take a seat there. Being a person with well documented attention problems, I grew bored waiting for my wife and wrestled myself into position on the advanced placement thigh-master, nearly hurting myself in the process, and began lifting. It felt too easy at first so I upped the weight again and again until I was lifting the entire stack – 290 lbs. I did a quick 10 reps and then stopped, not because I was tired or flagging, in fact it felt like I could go on like that for weeks, but because of the certainty that if I continued, the next day I would be so sore and stiff I wouldn’t be able to put on a pair of pants .

I left the gym feeling euphoric, as if I had discovered an odd, previously unknown super power – villains beware. So I’m just saying, if you need help cracking a walnut, or squeezing out that last dab of toothpaste, or perhaps crushing an old junk car into a cube of scrap metal, you know who to call. My thighs are at the ready.

When my first daughter was born, my life changed. It meant I had responsibilities I could no longer ignore. I, like so many before and since, was quietly going into soul-sucking debt trying to get my engineering degree. Fatherhood meant this had to stop and I needed to find a job. I sent a resume off to my dream employer, a local engineering firm known around the world, as well as papering practically every other company offering an open position.
I wound up employed in the warehouse of a residential lighting retailer.

My foreman was a real character who I suspect, like me, had had his dreams temporarily crushed. I started the new job in the middle of winter, which for the Seattle area is part of our eight-month-long monsoon season. We had three bays fitted with roll-up style doors that could be raised to allow semis to back up for offloading new stock, or contractors to pull in to be loaded with their orders. The doors each had a row of windows inset so we could see out. Each morning, first thing, my foreman would stand at the windows, look out at the clouds, puddles and falling rain, and pronounce, “What a feculent squat-thrust of a day.”

I didn’t know what feculent meant, but I’d done my fair share of squat-thrusts, and knew what the weather looked like. I surmised feculent wasn’t a positive description. Still, I was curious to know the true definition and went scrambling for my dictionary at home. My paperback Webster New Collegiate Dictionary didn’t have it. No feculent in my three-inch thick hardback American Heritage either. I had to go to the library, to their copy of the Oxford English Dictionary – you know, the one so thick you could prop it up with a stick, scatter bread crumbs underneath, and use to squash hapless critters if you were marooned and in need of a meal – that dictionary.

I won’t rob you of the pleasure of finding the definition for yourself and adding it to your vocabulary. Suffice it to say that my old foreman was dead-on nuts accurate with his assessment. And as I look out my window, I am reminded that once again here in the Pacific Northwest, we have reached the feculent squat-thrust part of our year. That description will likely remain accurate until July. Until then, it’s time for GORETEX or hibernation I think.

A little about the inspiration for my latest book, Zombie-saurus Rex, now available on Amazon.

For a while, I lived with a teenage zombie. She was my daughter. My child is a very bright, funny, and attractive girl. And she has epilepsy, diagnosed when she was ten after having a seizure in our home. At the time, the diagnosis was heartbreaking. A kid who had everything going for her was suddenly flawed and vulnerable. We met with neurologists who described how devastating the condition can be. If left unchecked, the seizures could cause permanent brain damage or death. The good news was that there were a host of medications available to keep her condition under control.

The medicine did its job. Eight years without a seizure. But at a huge cost. It rendered my daughter dull and lethargic. One of the side effects. She staggered through life as if she’d just awakened from long hibernation. She was the personification of a zombie.

Those years coincided with her junior high school and high school years. Kids can be merciless. Especially at that age range when they are trying to figure where they fit in, who they are like, and who doesn’t fit in. And she paid the price. So much so, that after her graduation when I offered to put her through college, she declined. She’d had about enough of the education system. And who could blame her?

The good news is science moves very fast these days. The list of potential drugs to treat epilepsy has grown greatly. Initially our neurologist didn’t want to change her medication. In his mind, in consideration of eight seizure-free years, the medicine was performing beautifully. We were finally able to convince him quality of life also had to be a consideration, as life in a stupor is hardly a life.

Rex Morton, the zombie protagonist in my novel, is the personification of my daughter, trying his best to find acceptance, or at the very least, tolerance. The story looks at how he pushes through prejudice, beyond snap judgments based solely on appearance, and deals with the physical manifestation of all that – bullying.

It’s not just another zombie story. It’s a story about overcoming and succeeding despite handicaps and obstacles. This one is personal.