"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."
In general, I really enjoyed LaRocca's writing style and story craft. All of these stories are trimmed down to the perfect amount of backstory/plot/characters that it doesn't feel like a single part of the story could be cut as unnecessary. These three stories are all very different lengths but each one feels perfectly complete as a story. Of course, I could see how some of these could be expanded into longer works, if LaRocca wanted to, but they all work really well at their current lengths. I'd be very interested in reading more from LaRocca again.
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
It feels like everyone I follow has read this by now and I've been seeing consistent praise for this story all around my social media. I'll be honest, I was intrigued but then it was gaining so much traction and so much buzz that I felt like it was maybe getting over-hyped. When this happens, I usually tend to avoid those stories for a number of months (or years, sometimes) to give the hype time to cool off and my brain time to let go of some things I'd heard. However, when the ARC of this collection came up on NetGalley I tossed my usual rule aside and requested it. As a result, I do think this first story was a little too over-hyped for me and so I was a bit let down overall. Folks weren't giving away many details of the actual plot, but there were so many visceral reactions I saw overall and so many people talking about how gross and twisted this story was.
And to be clear, this story was 100% gross and twisted and pretty fucked up in some parts. However, I was expecting more from it based on the buzz I was seeing online. Now I don't often read a lot of 'gross' horror and tend to lean more toward the psychological/medium body horror level of horror. Also, this story includes my #1 irrational fear (that is pretty specific) that hasn't come up often in the horror I read so this had all the ingredients to be a really visceral reading experience for me. However, it just didn't get me there in the end. I do think the story deserved the hype it got - I just wished I had given enough time for my expectations to go back down to a normal level before jumping in.
I think, aside from the over-hyped stuff which is no fault of the author, the main part that did lessen my engagement was the format of the story. We are reading emails and instant message exchanges between these two women and that became a sort of wall for me. It was the epitome of telling, not showing, because we really only get the characters telling each other the facts of what they did. This would be a completely different book if the emails/IMs were only a part of the book and then we follow the women in their day to day lives actually doing these acts so we can experience them 'first hand' as opposed to being filtered through their correspondence to each other. I really loved the framing around this whole story and, again, think following that portion in a full-length novel would be really interesting.
I did find the ending a bit abrupt and confusing because we get told right at the beginning how the characters end up but then the end of the story doesn't bring that full circle so I was initially confused on how the characters get to that end point. But then I slept on it and when I woke up the next morning, I was still thinking about this story and the pieces finally fell into place where (I think) I know what happened after the story ended.
4/5
TW/CW: animal death
The Enchantment
As far as horror sub-genres go, this story was much more of my regular sort of read. It leaned more toward the paranormal/psychological horror part of the spectrum and it was a really great slow-burn horror. I loved the isolated island setting and how that naturally escalated an already tense situation. I really loved the mix of threats and how they all sort of ebbed and flowed during certain times in the story. However, there wasn't a lot of time for the reader to really get settled into any one particular state of the story so sometimes these changes in focus just felt like they were coming a little too quickly. I was really impressed with the amount of character exploration and character development we got in this story. I think LaRocca did a great job of showing the reader exactly enough information of these characters and their previous lives so that the reader could tell how much of a change they were going through.
This is a very religion-focused story but as someone who didn't grow up in that environment, those themes didn't really impact my overall reading experience. However, for other readers with different types of faith, I could see how this might be a really different reading experience. In the Authors Note at the end of the book, LaRocca talks a bit about his own religious upbringing and how that fit into writing this story.
5/5
TW/CW: religion, suicide, animal death, pregnancy, miscarriage
You'll Find It's Like That All Over
This was the shortest story in the collection and I normally have a hard time settling into short stories. However, I really liked how this story had such a small cast and a very small environment that it was really easy to get into the story. I'd call this story more suspenseful than horror because there is this constant sense that something is 'off' about this neighbor. I really liked the framing of this story where these two almost-strangers are drawn together and there's a really great dynamic where they're figuring each other out through this game. I do wish there would have been a more gradual increase of the stakes over each phase of the game because the last phase really seemed to jump to super serious out of nowhere. As much as I think the story was positively impacted by having a small cast/setting, I really liked how the ending sort of opened the rest of this world up to the reader.
4/5
Thanks to NetGalley and Titan Books for the ARC. Expected publication date is September 6, 2022
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