Review: Mad Hallelujah And Other Oddities by Owen Morgan

"Behold, these mad hallelujahs, we scream into the dark"An already cracked marriage is obliterated with a single word...A hiker is compelled to join a strange child, digging in the woods...A clump of hair in the drain turns out to be much more horrible than it appears...An experiment in rubberisation rebounds in violent fashion at a secret research facility... All this and more is held within these pages, waiting for your eyeballs. Mad Hallelujah and other oddities is the debut poetry and short fiction collection from Owen Morgan, featuring 14 tales to make your skin crawl and your bones dance. These stories will take you to some utterly bizarre, crushingly dark and gloriously absurd places......but at least you'll have some fun along the way.

Mad Hallelujah and other Oddities is a work of literary genius.  Have you ever wished your spouse away with a single word?  How often have you seen a clump of hair stuck in the plug hole and pulled and been surprised by what lays beneath?  Or a beautiful rose bush that signifies something far deeper and darker.  Owen Morgan has delved feet first into topics that lay dormant in the back of our psyche and he has the key to unlock the cage to our darkest fears.  He has made the unthinkable totally and utterly realistic. 

My favourite short story within the collection was either; Flower of Flesh and Blood or The Elgin Incident.  Let me first examine Flower of Flesh and Blood.  It is no secret that I love horror stories that delve into the very scary world of body horror.  Haven’t we all wished our bullies should come to some kind of nasty fate?  Unfortunately, in this story it is the mother that is the abuser.  We have seen how she can inflict damage both mentally and physically upon her son.  She is a woman of little conscience.  Sam has suspected such evil and brutality from her before but with no proof.  He lands himself in hot water with her once again when he destroys her precious rose bushes.  The harrowing scene that follows is a difficult pill to swallow.  She beats her own son bloody with the deceased remnants of said rose bush.  He wishes that she would just go away and leave him.  He’s tired of her draconian ways – what follows is one of the best scenes in body horror I have read.  Gory and vivid, we see just how Morgan’s imagination can come into the fold. 

The Elgin Incident is a brilliant case study of how sometimes an idea should be left well alone.  Stuart Elgin is an incredibly intelligent man…too intelligent.  The idea of creating a real life flubber in a lab was, well, hilarious.  This story was deeply disturbing in its violence, but I couldn’t stop laughing.  It truly deserved a Darwin award.  What could go wrong when developing the world rubbiest rubber?  This is where we see Owen Morgan’s dark and sardonic sense of humour and it is divine!

Mad Hallelujah and Other Oddities is definitely for those that love their horror in bite sized portions.  Creepy and marvellous. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Owen is a writer from South Wales in the UK. He specialises in flash fiction and short stories. His first flash fiction/poetry collection The Great Travelling Graveyard and other brief tales was published in October 2019.

He is also the co-owner of The Abominable Book Club Ltd, the UK’s only horror fiction subscription box.

you can follow him on twitter @ON_morgan or on instagram @on_morgan_, where he is liable to talk about horror movies, professional wrestling, and dumb ideas for stories.

The Abominable Book club