Bad Things Happen Here
By Mark Morris
- Bad Things Happen Here
-
Author: Mark Morris
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Publisher: Flame Tree Press
- ISBN: 9781805520085
- Published: June 2026
- Pages: 313
- Format reviewed: Paperback
- Review date: 19/06/2026
- Language: English
I read quite a lot of horror, to the point that it does not really affect me anymore, flesh eating clowns, aliens that tear off limbs, none of this is going to happen to me. A child being bullied at school, another joining a rough crowd, work becoming too stressful, a parent with dementia. These this could happen, these real horrors of the mundane are the stuff that gets under my skin nowadays. Mark Morris’ Bad Things Happen Here combines the two in a story about a group of people whose student days come back to haunt them.
Five students lived the normal student experience, but it always felt like one of the rooms in the halls of residence did not feel right. Fast forward 20 years and the likes of Hannah, Jess, Steve and Max no longer talk or see one another. Each lives a separate live, but independently things appear to be unravelling. They are having issues, seeing things in the corner of their eye, and not just them, so are their family members. Could this be linked to what happened the last day they saw each other?
Bad Things certainly lives up to its name, not only in old school horror, but that unsettling human horror that weighs on your shoulder as soon as you learn about responsibility. Hannah is a divorced single mother with a husband who is trying to take the children and a mother who is showing the early signs of dementia. That is enough horror for one life, but the strange spiders people keep seeing and the creature whispering into her Mum’s ear is not helping.
Hannah is not the only one having an issue; Jess is being haunted by the monsters that live in her art, Max is no longer convinced that his family is real, and Steven keeps driving whilst spiders are jumping out on him. It takes a while, but Hannah in particular starts to see a pattern, is it affecting her old university friends?
The narrative moves around a lot, between the various ex-students, some of the family members, and flashbacks to the past. I found it a little confusing to begin with as during the same time that you are discovering the various characters, we are also being teased about a strange entity, and a flashback sequence. The tale settles down as the book progresses, due to some of the character arcs combining, and others stopping, but this does take a while.
A horror novel should be scary, or at least unsettling. As mentioned, I am hard to scare, but the moments of body horror and terror, are effective. I still found the human terror of real life more disturbing, Morris layers this well into the book. Imagine having to cope with everyday life and the supernatural? It would be too much!
The reason behind the terror is a little unclear; horror being the unknown is not unusual, but I feel that it was not explained to make sense with the characters. A big coherent reveal would have explained why these students have been targeted, but it feels like plain old bad luck. That feels a little unsatisfying as more threads added to the back story would have informed the present better.
With the original horror of the early 00s not on the same level as the later modern terror, the book ebbs and flows. However, when Morris comes to describe the characters and their lives in their late 30s, it feels real, and horrible. There is an imbalance to Bad Things, but it is still an enjoyable horror story with some effecting moments.
Written on 19th June 2026 by Sam Tyler .
Topics and themes
Tone & Pace
Themes
Setting
Content/Warnings
General
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