Fiction Reviews
Fever Dreams
(2025) edited by Mark Morris, Flame Tree Press,
£20 / Can$34.95 / US$26.95, hrdbk, 263pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58872-1
Fever Dreams is the sixth volume in the non-themed horror series of original stories, showcasing the very best short fiction that the genre has to offer, and edited by Mark Morris. This new anthology contains 20 original horror stories, 16 of which have been commissioned from some of the top names in horror, and 4 selected from the hundreds of stories sent to Flame Tree during a short open submissions window. Mark Morris has 50 novels and collections under his belt and also written for Doctor Who and Jago & Litefoot.
Mark Morris’ ABC of Horror continues. We’ve had After Sundown, Beyond the Veil, Close to Midnight, Darkness Beckons and Elemental Forces, and now we have Fever Dreams. I would imagine that Morris would have no problems naming the next book “Ghastly something” or “Ghostly something”, or whatever, and have it even easier with “H” as in “haunted”, “haunting”, horrific”, but we’ll see how he gets on in future years with some of the most unhelpful letters of the alphabet.
Horror anthologies are always a mixed bag for the reader, some stories hitting the mark better than others, depending on what rocks their horror boat, be it haunted houses, haunted people, body horror, quiet horror, relationships, or one of the most familiar tropes – “you don’t want to go there” story. Fortunately, Morris has a good eye for curating stories whether they are those he has commissioned, to those chosen through a submission process, so readers can expect an anthology covering most aspects of horror fiction, and with a bit of luck they’ll discover the work of a writer of whom they just have to read more.
Given the stories are mainly commissioned by Morris, some of the authors are well known in the horror world, and I was familiar with the likes of Tim Waggoner, the always-excellent Gary McMahon who doesn’t write enough for my liking; Priya Sharma, Phillip Fracassi (with a story called "The Mummified Corpse of Reese Witherspoon”, I kid you not), A. K. Benedict, Jeffrey Ford, Lucy A. Snyder, Kay Chronister, Rebecca Harrison and Christopher Golden. The rest of the line-up were unknown to me, including those who had made it through the submission process.
As for the stories, well, as mentioned horror anthologies are a mixed bag in subject matter, and success, but here we have a collection that contains predatory men (as in Tracy Fahey’s “May I Borrow You for a Moment, great title) to people crumbling under their own mental fraility (Tim Waggoner’s “Enter, Kill, Exit” – and does it do what it says on the tin? Well, you are going to have to read it to find out), Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club (Back to Fracassi’s story again, and a certain mummified corpse), the ability to speak to the dead through a special telephone (a device used in A. K. Benedict’s “The Wind Telephone” which reads like a mash-up of Joe Hill and Ray Bradbury as a young woman learns the truth about her twin’s death).
Loss of self is a common trope in horror fiction and C. J. Leede’s “Midnight Disease” delivers it in spades with the story of a new mother who is depressed and at a crossroads in her life, but which direction will she take? Leede’s story mines the same sort of territory as Ryan Cole’s “At the Bottom, She Rots”, again, concerning a new mother.
As mentioned, a lot of horror stories can be boiled down into the “you shouldn’t have gone there” category and several stories fall neatly into this trope such as “Forty Below” by Caolan Mac an Aircinn where a man has to go to the Antarctic to guard a prisoner, but who is the prisoner, and is he even human? In “The Shadow of His Vibrance”, a woman returns home to clear out her late father’s possessions and finds that he had a strange hold over the locals. In Alan Baxter’s “Watch the Skies”, a woman escapes to the countryside to get away from her partner’s infidelity, and wishes she hadn’t. Slightly different is Rob Francis’ “The Sitter” where a painter arriving at someone’s house to paint them. But it is not all regretting where you have ventured. “Fever Dreams” also includes deadly dinner parties, political satire (or is it just political horror?), and an afterlife you won’t believe until you’ve read Rebecca Harrison’s “Agony Street”.
All in all, Morris has delivered another strong horror anthology from some of the best writers around, and new faces who hopefully will go far. Here’s to more alphabetic terror. Recommended.
Ian Hunter
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