Bad Things Happen Here by Mark Morris
I would like to thank Flame Tree Press for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Flame Tree Press
Published – Out Now
Price –£20 hardback £3.82 eBook
In 2004 a group of six students, who have newly arrived at university and quickly become friends, are beset by supernatural forces, which seem to centre around a 5th floor room in an otherwise innocuous student hall of residence. So insidious and terrifying is their ordeal that one of the six commits suicide, an act which drives an irreparable wedge between the rest.
Twenty years later, the remaining five friends are all living very different lives. Hannah Prentice is a divorcee with two children, the youngest of whom is being badly bullied at school, and a mother who is showing the first signs of dementia; Jess Maple is a professional artist, who is just about to break into the big time; Steve Lazenby is a successful architect, whose eight-year-old daughter is suffering from delusions and nightmares; Max Bradshaw is a self-employed plumber, happily married with three children, whose fourteen-year-old son has fallen in with the wrong crowd; and Michael Vance, bohemian and charismatic at university, is now a drug-addicted vagrant, who harbours a terrible secret…
Although the five friends have not been in contact for almost two decades, they are gradually drawn back together when their lives begin to fall apart. What happened to them twenty years ago seems to be seeping back into the present, affecting not just them this time, but their children, their partners, their loved ones.
As the terrifying visions, the violence and the madness escalate, they must mobilise forces and once again confront the horror in Room 55.
Growing older can be a horror story. Not just the sense that time is taking its toll on us physically but that as we age we face different challenges and responsibilities that we have to try and muddy through. In Mark Morris’ effective horror novel Bad Things Happen Here a group of five late thirty-somethings all trying to be the adults in the room find that a supernatural force from their past is now out for a final reckoning.
Hannah is now facing into being a single parent when her daughter starts to be bullied by a cruel teenager. Jess is trying to push her art into the major end of the scene and make a financial killing; both are perturbed though by some strange visitations. Hannah is then surprised to find an ex-boyfriend from her university days in the garden in an incredibly poor state of health. The strange events get more frequent and target members of her family. Two more of their old group Steve and Max also find their lives getting much harder. It all links to when they were six friends just starting university when a strange room created chaos and death over a few months.
I enjoyed this story with a few reservations. The most effective scenes are unusually for these types of novels this time the adult sections. Morris plays with the fears of adults – relationship breakdowns, losing the respect of your children, parental dementia and with a supernatural flourish each of the former students finds that fear enhanced by visitations, strange behaviours, doppelgangers. Fr those not aware it looks like they’re all coming down with a stress-indued reaction impacting their grip on reality, but we get to see that isolation and, in some cases, delusions take full control. Tanya and Jess are our more active protagonists and both quite sympathetic as they put the clues together and try to solve things. Again, unusually it’s the male characters who end up being the ones most in danger and who may (or may not escape) whatever is after them. It is good to see a male writer avoid the conventions of the past.
The actual university supernatural events are delivered effectively. Indeed, the focus on a strange university residence may sound familiar to those of us who have listened to the podcast Uncanny and yes this has been inspired by THAT episode. Morris makes those scenes come well and make the threat real. What for me works less well is we really get little sense of the cast as their younger selves what may have led them to their later choices. They lack a key depth and texture to show us the people they will become later so the story feels a little unbalanced. This also means the end feels more a required conclusion to events that a journey we’ve been on that finally meets its climax.
Bad Things Happen Here is a good well-paced horror novel that I think will occupy your time, but I think doesn’t quite have enough to make it make a really long-standing impression. But as the dark nights lengthen, I think a suitable chiller to start the season!
