At Dark, I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca

Book Review

Ben Unsworth

As my first longer piece of Eric LaRocca fiction, having only read 4 short stories of his previously, I didn’t entirely know what to expect. Suffice to say, I now want to read more because, with humble and unassuming prose, LaRocca delivers a tale with enough grump and misery to fill an ocean. 

Centred around protagonist Ashley’s rather unusual service (burying people alive for half an hour so they understand the sensation of death and therefore relinquish their life and its emotional baggage more), everything presented here has a subtle sense of the cosmic. Every threat is human, even the hallucinatory visions of the protagonist’s missing child and dead wife. Though it avoids any the more eldritch end of the cosmic horror spectrum, it is resolute in making you feel small, insignificant, and nothing more than a fleshy husk with red, squishy bits keeping you going.

From the very first chapter, the offbeat premise is at fore. Equally akin to the comforting delights of hot chocolate as the fierce pangs of absinthe, the tale as a whole has a remarkably liquid quality. Flowing through all the ways it can exploit grimness, while events overtake themselves, there’s the unerring repetition of hidden battles; be it sexuality, emotions, or any of the other conditions that LaRocca portrays as vital to our existence. Fair warning, it does starfish its way across multiple trigger warnings in order to achieve this, so the uninitiated may want to think twice; however, no element is actually gratuitous on its own. Rather than being designed to cause vomiting fits, each triggering horror is instead designed to make the situation more unpleasant, and by the final third is delivered raw and without filter, to the extent you pity every character for simply being trapped in this novel. In fact, you cannot help but wonder if LaRocca has some vendetta against your emotional sanity.

Yet its flirtations with extremeness aren’t just a replacement for true development either; when the events turn toward the extreme, it is as much a side effect of the core story as it is any conscious bout of Friedkin-like intensity. Soon, we see Ashley’s chances of seeing his son again diminish like a snuffed-out candle at the same time as his own story becomes murkier and his clients become edgier. With multiple plains of morality at play, the character’s pseudo-journey of enlightenment is punctured by conversations he has in online forums – and in some ways they’re far more enthralling and horrifying than any of Ashley’s own exploits. The details of other lost souls’ depravity are instantly terrifying.

Don’t be put off by the story’s somewhat shorter length and the addition of a more mainstream publisher though – nothing is rushed or sacrificed as a result. Grief serves as the key to this book’s vice in many ways and, as such, evinces a kind of call of the void in literature form. It appears also to be an obsession. LaRocca is clearly willing to indulge, stopping just before it seems like the essence of noir has become sentient and is trying to waterboard you with your own tears. Whether in the smaller tale of a man loving a cancer or the wider tale of a man mourning for his son and wife, the brutal, cutting prose does its job. Fundamentally, if you love puissant visuals, this is a book for you regardless of how unprepared for the consequences you are.

By the end, you might be forgiven for wondering what you have in fact just read, as in some ways the book outlines a silhouette which your own grasp on emotion fills in rather than guiding you to any overboard, physical description. The book however is careful in keeping all the plates spinning until the payoff and so no singular emotion actually becomes off-putting despite the intensity propping it up. For any connoisseur of Poppy Z. Brite and Alison Rumfitt’s thematic love child, I reckon it’s all you can ask for. Just gird yourself for the fact that when you read the final paragraph, you’ll suffer the paradox of pleasurable shellshock.