TL;DR: A 24-story invasion sampler that goes after your planet, house, guts, and brain with a mix of clever high concept pieces and solid meat and potatoes horror. The hit rate is good for a chunky indie anthology. The standouts are fucked up in all the right ways, but the collection as a whole stops short of true must read territory.

L. Andrew Cooper and H. J. Dutton are not randos pulling slush out of a hat. Cooper runs the Horrific Scribblings micro press and has a long track record in horror fiction, criticism, and even screenwriting, while Dutton comes in as both co-editor and contributor. This is the first Horrific Scribes print style anthology spun out of their online archive, and it reads like a mission statement: transgressive dark fiction obsessed with boundaries, how they fail, and how much fun it is when something crawls through the crack and wrecks your shit. The historical intro walks through Dracula, Wells, Cronenberg, Polanski, slashers, and mind control horror to frame invasion as the perfect umbrella for what the press wants to do.

Structurally, the book is simple and effective. Four sections divide the theme into World, Home, Body, and Mind, each with short editor notes that tee up the next run of stories and lightly place them in horror history. In practice that means street cracking alien flowers that gas tourists, cursed trail cams, parasitic “mind swimmers,” organ farms, and mental health monsters that literally eat your worries. You are not getting one big arc so much as a guided tour of different kinds of invasion, from the global to the deeply personal.

What is special here is that the editors actually edit. The one page intros before each story are genuinely useful, framing pieces like Steven Mathes’s “Swimmer” as a twist on parasite horror that is more about eating disorders and codependency than world conquest, or positioning “The Flesh Factory” as a nasty extrapolation of late stage capitalist medicine where poor kids are raised purely as regenerating organ sacks. It feels curatorial rather than academic, like having a horror nerd friend whispering “here’s why this one hits different” before you dive in.

Several stories really land. Opener “Weed Killer” is a tight eco-horror piece about unkillable “weeds” forcing their way through city pavement, charming a town into hashtag photo ops before dumping golden pollen on everyone. When the flowers finally blossom and birds fall from the sky like hail, the tone snaps from quirky to apocalyptic in a way that feels mean in the best way. T. Fox Dunham’s “Survival Instinct” marries alien bug takeover stuff to mob noir and cancer treatment, following a hitman whose body is already being eaten from the inside while something much older and hungrier tries to recruit the Philly families. “From a Trail Cam Pointed at Our House” uses an autistic kid’s obsession with elevator videos and a trail cam in the greenway behind the house to stage a very patient, creeping home invasion that is as much about the dad’s aching distance from his son as whatever is getting closer on those night vision stills.

On the Body and Mind side, “The Flesh Factory” is straight up industrial splatter with a bitter sense of humor, narrated by an aging organ sack whose spleen keeps getting grown back and harvested for rich clients. It is gross, funny, and grim as fuck. “Swimmer” is quieter but smart, turning the trope of a brain slug into an unwanted cure for self loathing. And closer to the end, “Worryeater” delivers one of the best monsters in the book, a long armed thing that crawls out of a grandfather clock to eat the intrusive thoughts of an OCD protagonist, for a price that is more psychological than physical. Those are the ones that made me sit up and go, okay, that is some cool shit.

The writing has a pretty high floor. Most of the stories are cleanly written, with straightforward voices and clear scene construction. You do not get a ton of baroque stylistic weirdness or wild experimentation; this mostly reads like mainstream dark fiction with a couple of weirder textures. Dialogue tends to be functional rather than sparkling, and a few pieces feel like very solid magazine stories that never quite push past the expected beat map. At 24 entries plus all the editorial apparatus, fatigue creeps in toward the back half. You start to feel the pattern: concept paragraph, domestic setup, thing intrudes, one or two gory or uncanny set pieces, twist or gut punch, done. When the individual voice and theme are sharp that is fine, but some mid tier stories blur together in a haze of competent nastiness.

The anthology is laser focused on boundaries, especially how capitalism, family, and mental illness chew through them. “Weed Killer” and other world pieces play climate dread like a sick joke, turning curiosity and tourism into the thing that kills you. The home stories are all about the ways domestic space is already unstable before anything supernatural shows up. The body section might be the strongest, with its mix of parasites, medical abuse, and uncomfortable intimacy, while the mind stories loop back to control and consent, from culty media to intrusive parents and predatory entities that know exactly what flavor of guilt to weaponize. The result is low grade panic about how little buffer you actually have between yourself and the things that want a piece of you.

This is a a strong, very indie snapshot of what smaller presses are doing in 2025 rather than a genre defining landmark. It is a good sampler of emerging voices and a pretty clear statement of intent for Horrific Scribblings, even if it does not quite hit the transcendently fucked heights of the very best single author collections or tightly curated anthologies.

A smart, nasty, and frequently fun invasion mix that is worth your time even if it never quite plants a flag on your brain.

Invasions of World, Home, Body and Mind
published December 16, 2025 by Horrific Scribblings.