It had taken, at most, three seconds for the elevator to pass downwards from the sixteenth to the twelfth ... Mr Meldrum had ceased to be, and something hideously different took his place.

A man convinced that he has developed a phantom beak edges towards a terrible metamorphosis. Interlopers dismissing the superstitions of hare-women in the countryside pay for their scepticism with blood. The cruel jokes of a girl at the village festival of the Green Man lead her to a crueller transfiguring in the woods.

Tracing the quintessential horror concept of the strange transformation from the Victorian era through to the modern day, horror writer, expert and enthusiast Mark Morris presents a thrilling selection of metamorphic tales. Including stories of bestial shapeshifters such as the tiger-men, fox spirits and werewolves of world folklore, this collection also presents some of the weirder shifts of the horror genre, where a flatworm masquerades as a boy, a girl becomes one with a bridge, and a babe-in-arms and her beekeeper father come to reflect the creatures of the hives.

Mark Morris is, in the words of Clive Barker, "one of the finest horror writers at work today". Alongside his horror novels and collections of horror short stories, Morris won a British Fantasy award-winning editor for his work on horror cinema Cinema Macabre, and he has also edited short story anthologies for Flame Tree Press. Beyond horror, Mark has written novelisations for Doctor Who and other popular film and video game franchises.