Book Spotlight | Bad Things Happen Here by Mark Morris

Today, the spotlight is on Bad Things Happen Here by Mark Morris!

Described as “an old-school descent into madness”, this is a supernatural horror from a multi-award-winning author of over 50 novels, winner of the New York Festival Radio Award for Best Drama Special and Festival Radio Awards.

To give you a taste, I’m sharing the synopsis and an excerpt from the book. Thank you to the publisher for this exclusive excerpt!

Author: Mark Morris
Publisher: Flame Tree Press
Publication Date: 30 June 2026
Pages: 320

SYNOPSIS

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.

EXCERPT

Even though their corridor is quiet, Ben is finding it hard to concentrate. It’s as if there’s a fly buzzing in his head. They’re halfway through the third week of term, and he’s working on his first essay. It’s a speculative piece about what impact the rise of social media platforms, like Mark Zuckerberg’s newly launched Facebook, might eventually have on the world economy.

Ben is surrounded by notes, and textbooks, and photocopied magazine articles, but he’s finding it hard to pull his disparate thoughts together. Maybe it’s because he’s over-anxious about getting off to a good start, and impressing his tutor, but he thinks it’s more than that.

He hasn’t said much to Michael, who’s currently sprawled on his bed with his eyes closed, listening to music on his headphones, but he’s been unsettled ever since his first day here, when, in the window of their shared room, he saw what he thought was the reflection of a hooded figure standing behind him. He’d been surrounded by people – people who’ve since become friends – and after the initial shock, they’d jointly laughed it off, made jokes about it. Ben had accepted, both publicly and privately, that he must have been mistaken, that the stress of new surroundings and new people, compounded by alcohol and weed and tiredness, had caused him to see something that wasn’t there.

All of which makes sense – makes so much sense, in fact, that it seems like the obvious solution. And yet…there’s something. Even now, there’s something nibbling away at him. It’s as if that experience, spurious or not, was a seed that has now blossomed into a kind of paranoia he can’t shake off. In the past couple of weeks he’s suffered bouts of sleeplessness, interspersed with awful, vivid nightmares. In one, which he’s endured several times, he’s sensed something standing in the corner of the room, at the foot of his bed. The thing has been all but formless, a deeper black within the darkness that surrounds it, and yet emanating from it has been a sense of pure, undiluted evil. He knows that sounds corny, but it’s the only way he can think of to describe it; an entity that means him nothing but harm, and that radiates an energy so negative, so nihilistic, that it seems to crush all sense of joy, of optimism, from him.

Although he’s sure those experiences were nightmares, on no occasion has he snapped awake with a sense of relief. If he had, he could have compartmentalized them, accepted them as something awful but separate from his conscious life, and therefore not real.

Instead, though, the two states, sleep and wakefulness, illusion and reality, have bled into one another, and now they seem intertwined. Not only that, but his waking life seems tainted somehow, even poisoned. He goes through the motions of eating, and talking, and laughing with his friends, but underlying it all is a sense of dread, a feeling of darkness lurking. It must be, he thinks, how cancer patients feel, or prisoners facing the death penalty.

It’s not simply death, though, that he fears. It’s something worse. Only, he doesn’t know what that ‘something’ is.

With a groan of frustration, he throws down his pen and presses the fleshy pads of his hands into his eye sockets. His eyes are itchy with tiredness, and his brain is like cement – and sometimes he tells himself that’s all it is; he’s just incredibly tired, which makes him paranoid and anxious, which means he can’t think straight.

After rubbing his eyes, he groans again, then glances across at Michael. His roommate still has his eyes closed and his headphones on, so he’s unaware of Ben’s distress. Or maybe, Ben thinks, he’s pretending not to notice. Not because he doesn’t care, but because he doesn’t want to admit there’s anything wrong with this room, or this floor, or this building; he simply doesn’t want to have that conversation. Ben can’t be entirely sure that Michael feels the same as he does, but there have been times when he’s caught his roommate looking at him in a serious and troubled way, that makes Ben think he’s on the verge of asking or confessing something. Plus, Ben thinks that however much Michael tries to be the life and soul of the party, he’s lost something of his early buoyancy. Nowadays his cheerfulness seems forced. And when he’s not with Hannah, or the others, he spends much of his time as he’s spending it now – lying on his bed, eyes closed, listening to music through his headphones, as if he’s trying both to recoup lost energy and block out the world.

Ben stares at Michael for a good ten seconds, half hoping his friend will sense his scrutiny and open his eyes, force the issue by asking Ben what’s wrong. But he doesn’t, and Ben realizes he’s going to have to do this the hard way.

He doesn’t know what’s holding him back, to be honest. It’s not as if he’s about to confess something shameful, or something Michael will tease him about. He swallows, clears his throat. Then he slaps himself twice across the cheek, quite hard, as if to rouse himself from a stupor. He opens his mouth, and is about to speak, to say Michael’s name loud enough to be heard over the music hissing in his friend’s headphones, when there is a terrible, grinding clank out in the corridor.

Ben’s words dry in his throat and he turns towards the door. He knows it’s only the lift hauling itself upwards, but he’s grown to hate that sound – and he’s grown to hate the lift too, though he can’t put his finger on why. He’s never been claustrophobic, and he doesn’t really think there’s anything wrong with it, despite the noises it makes. Over the last couple of weeks, though, he’s grown to dread being alone in there. He’s started to think that if he was in there on his own, and something happened – the lights going out, the lift stopping between floors – he’d be trapped, vulnerable. Trapped with…

 His thoughts veer away before he can follow them through – but not before he gets a fleeting image in his mind of the black thing standing at the end of his bed.

The whirring clank of the lift grows steadily louder, then stops with a creaking thump. Two seconds of silence follow, and then Ben hears the lift doors open, with a gritty, sliding rumble.

He waits for the inevitable sounds that follow its arrival: chatter, laughter, the scuffs and thumps of movement as its occupants head to one or more of the eight rooms on this floor.

 But there’s nothing. Once the doors have rumbled open, there’s simply a weighty silence. Still half-turned towards the door, right hand gripping the back of his chair, Ben realizes he’s holding his breath. Slowly and carefully, as if unwilling to draw attention to himself, he starts to exhale.

And that’s when he hears heavy, ponderous footsteps approaching their room.

Instantly he feels his flesh contracting, feels an urge to scramble off his chair and crouch behind it. He tells himself he’s being ridiculous, but there’s something indefinably awful about the footsteps. They’re too slow, too heavy, too deliberate. Even now, though, Ben tells himself they belong to a fellow student, one so drunk and tired that all he wants is his bed.

The footsteps stop right outside their door.

And now Ben does scramble out of his chair. But instead of hiding, he darts across to where Michael is still lying with his eyes closed, and he grabs his arm.

Michael jumps and his eyes pop open. He looks at Ben wildly, and too loudly he says, “What the fuck?”

Ben clenches his teeth in anguish and puts a finger to his lips.

Cottoning on that something’s wrong, Michael removes his headphones and sits up. Quietly he says, “What’s up?”

Ben points and whispers, “There’s someone outside the door.”

Michael follows his pointing finger. Puzzled, he asks, “Who?”

“I don’t know. They came up in the lift. They’re standing outside right now.”

“So why don’t you answer it?”

It’s an obvious question, and Ben can’t help feeling foolish, slightly defensive. Still speaking barely above a whisper, he says, “It was weird, the way they walked up to the door. Really slow footsteps. All a bit freaky. They haven’t knocked or anything.”

Michael looks at Ben as if he’s not sure what his point is, and then, to Ben’s horror, he suddenly shouts, “Is anybody there?”

Ben ducks, as if he expects the door to explode inwards. Michael gives a brief bark of laughter, then immediately looks apologetic. “Hey, you’re really freaked out by this, aren’t you?”

Letting go of Michael’s arm, Ben does his best to pull himself together. “It’s weird, that’s all. Who would just stand there like that?”

“Only one way to find out,” says Michael, and swings his legs off the bed. He strides across the room and pulls the door open.

Ben flinches, but although Michael’s tall frame is mostly filling the doorway, Ben can see that the space in front of their door is empty. Without hesitation, Michael steps out of the room and looks to his right, because there’s nothing to his left except a wall; their room is at the end of the corridor.

After a moment, he steps back into the room and looks at Ben with a thoughtful expression.

“No one there,” he says.

Excerpt from Bad Things Happen Here © 2026 by Mark Morris. All rights reserved.

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Cover photo by Jeana Bala