Review: 'Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes' by Eric LaRocca

Winter is the perfect time for horror, I feel. You're wrapped up all warm and comfy and there are holidays around every corner, but it's also getting darker and darker, the days always shorter. The perfect space for some horror to try and push you over the edge into discomfort. The horror I chose this holiday season comes from Eric LaRocca and it definitely pushes. Thanks to Titan Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 9/6/2022
Publisher: Titan Books

Three dark and disturbing horror stories from an astonishing new voice, including the viral-sensation tale of obsession, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. For fans of Kathe Koja, Clive Barker and Stephen Graham Jones.

A whirlpool of darkness churns at the heart of a macabre ballet between two lonely young women in an internet chat room in the early 2000s—a darkness that threatens to forever transform them once they finally succumb to their most horrific desires. 
 
A couple isolate themselves on a remote island in an attempt to recover from their teenage son’s death, when a mysterious young man knocks on their door during a storm…
 
And a man confronts his neighbour when he discovers a strange object in his back yard, only to be drawn into an ever-more dangerous game.
 
From Bram Stoker Award finalist Eric LaRocca, this is devastating, beautifully written horror from one of the genre’s most cutting-edge voices.
 
What have you done today to deserve your eyes?

Things Have Gotten Worse features three stories filled with dread, darkness, and loneliness. In his afterword LaRocca discusses how each of these stories are connected by a single theme, namely the human desire for connection, to be seen, to fit in. In 'Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke' two women connect on a forum over selling an apple peeler. From there, a BDSM-tinged relationship starts which quickly escalates into something unhealthy. The story goes almost a little too fast for me, in the way the relationship deepens, but the extremes of it are great illustrations for the desperate desire to connect and belong. 'The Enchantment' tracks the way a family breaks apart and tries to put the pieces back together. This story is a lot shorter than the first and I did feel like I was lacking motivation and character-depth at times.  'You'll Find It's Like That All Over' is the last and shortest story. It plays with our desire to fit in and not make waves. How far will a man go in his neighbour's weird game of bets, just to be polite? This story is almost absurd in its premise, but it is also gripping in the way the game escalates. However, it is so brief that you have to conjecture quite a bit to make it all fit. It's like a fever dream, in a way. 

This is my first time reading Eric LaRocca and I am mildly torn by these stories. While each of them features bizarre situations, scenarios, and events, they each also have a very human vein. The titular story expresses this the best, aided by the fact it is also the longest. I enjoyed the epistolary form of it, the way the contact between the two characters was shown through emails and texts. But we also never fully develop a set "voice" for each character, nor do we get to know a whole lot about them. There are only glimpses, which are intriguing and make me wish for more. As I said, the escalation of their relationship is also rather sudden, which removes some of the suspense. These "issues"  are stronger in the other two stories, which are a lot shorter. So much happens in 'The Enchantment', a lot of which spoke to me in a visual way, more than a literary one. I could imagine the setting, the weather, the lighting, opening a door onto a particular scene, etc., but I could not reason the 'why' or even the 'how'. The same is true for the last story, which was really only a few pages long, only here the glimpses we got at background only confused the story at its centre. I am glad to have read Things Have Gotten Worse, however, since its themes and ideas are intriguing ones. It is the desperation that speaks out of all of these stories, the inability for humans to fully understand themselves and their motivations, that gripped me about this collection. I would definitely want to read more by LaRocca to see how these themes develop in his writing. 

I give this collection...

3 Universes!

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes is a very atmospheric horror collection which will definitely lead you to question yourself and those around you. What is it that we're searching for in others? What kind of connection do we crave? And when does it go too far? While the stories didn't run very smoothly for me, I was nonetheless intrigued by them.