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.
Dark, creepy bleatings, my lovely tribe! Mark Morris strikes again, this time with a novel that feels like a good, old-school horror story. Mark’s style is totally different but I found it reminded me of earlier Stephen King works with its multiple characters and passage of time.
In the present, five seemingly disconnected people are going about their lives but they’re all slowly (but also kind of suddenly) starting to fall apart in…let’s say “odd” ways. Turns out that these people were once much closer, and something happened to them in their past that bound and traumatised them. That something appears to have resurfaced and something needs to be done about it.
Initially, I was struggling a bit because we’re head hopping between the perspectives of these characters. I actually love this as a narrative style, but apparently I have a limit on the amount of characters (a measly two, if you’re wondering) before I get confused about who’s who. That’s not to say that the characters aren’t well drawn and unique, just that my capacity to remember names (and therefore everything else about the characters), is shockingly bad. However, I always trust Mark’s writing and I knew that if I didn’t worry about it and just relaxed, everyone would become clear to me, and they did!
One of the several things I loved about this story was how different the lives of the characters were, as well as their personalities. They’re so different that you can’t imagine they were ever friends, but as we dip into flashbacks of the past, we see what drew and temporarily kept them together. Another thing that was interesting was seeing how different some of them were in the present to how they were when they were together in the past.
Perhaps my favourite element of this book is how sincerely unsettling and creepy it is. It’s a classic slow burn and when we hit that final act, things accelerate quite explosively. The further into the story I got, the more uneasy I was as the scarier elements encroached. Finally, I really enjoyed Mark’s restraint. There’s a lot of mystery about what the F is going on and why, but he doesn’t feel the need to explicitly spell out every detail. This is something I prefer about the horror of decades past which I think has got lost a little in more modern fiction. Back in the day, authors were comfortable letting a little mystery remain because sometimes not having every answer is scarier than a complete resolution. There’s a tendency these days to fully or even over-explain the ‘why’ of a tale, and I think in some cases this does horror a disservice. I loved that Mark pulled back a bit towards the end in this regard.
Overall, a really enjoyable, scary horror story that I would recommend.
If you’d like to check out the book or the author, (the novel is due for release in the UK on 30th June) I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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