Eric LaRocca became famous on TikTok for a hundred-page novella about two women in a chat window, which is a genuinely strange route into a horror career and tells you a lot about what the books are.
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke came out from a small press in 2021, spread almost entirely through social media, got picked up by Titan Books, and turned LaRocca into the most-discussed new name in horror inside about eighteen months. He has since won a Splatterpunk Award and been nominated for the Bram Stoker and the Shirley Jackson.
What the Eric LaRocca books actually are is queer horror about power, and specifically about consent: the negotiation of it, the erosion of it, and what happens when somebody agrees to something and then keeps agreeing past the point where agreement means anything. The extremity in his books is almost always emotional before it is physical.
And the form is unusual. He works in novellas and short fiction rather than novels, uses found documents constantly, and writes in a deliberately mannered, slightly archaic register that readers either find hypnotic or unbearable. There is very little middle ground on him and the reviews reflect that.
He is also the most-recommended and most-returned author in modern horror, which is what happens when a book gets a million views on TikTok and a substantial share of the people who buy it are not horror readers.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. It’s about a hundred pages, it’s the reason he has a career, and it will settle the question either way in an evening.
Then We Can Never Leave This Place if it worked, and know that nothing else has matched the first one.
The Essential
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (2021)
Told entirely in emails, instant messages and forum posts, mostly from 2000. Agnes sells an antique apple peeler online. Zoe buys it. They begin corresponding, the correspondence becomes a relationship, and the relationship becomes a contract in which one of them agrees to be owned.
The escalation is the whole book and it is done extremely well: every step is agreed to, every step is smaller than the one before feels, and by the time you notice how far it has gone there is no obvious point at which it went wrong. That is the argument.
The last third is where readers divide. It becomes genuinely extreme, physically, and a substantial number of people who loved the first sixty pages put it down. The content warnings on it are real and they are not decorative.
It won the Splatterpunk Award and it remains his best work.
Also on disturbing books.
The Rest
We Can Never Leave This Place (2022)
A city under siege. Mother has taken in a lodger, a man with a suitcase who is charming and who nobody asked about, and Mara’s father has just died and is still in the house.
The novella is a fairy tale in structure and LaRocca does not pretend otherwise. There is a monstrous mother, a stranger who offers things, a girl who has to choose, and a set of rules that are stated and then broken.
What’s in the suitcase gets disclosed early, and it’s the best image in the book.
It is his most surreal work and the least grounded. The war is unnamed, the city is unnamed, and the register is closer to Angela Carter than to horror.
Most readers walk away agreeing the imagery outruns the story, and that the mother is a genuinely disturbing creation.
Around a hundred and thirty pages.
You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood (2022)
Presented as a found document. A collection of poems, journal entries, transcripts and fragments of a novel-in-progress, assembled by an editor after the death of Ambrose Thorne, a video game designer who murdered several people including his partner.
The novel-within-the-novel is a science fiction story about two people on an isolated planet, and it runs in fragments through the whole book, and it is not clear what relationship it has to what Thorne actually did.
That is the structure and it is his most ambitious formal work. The reader assembles the crime from documents that were never intended to explain it, and the poetry is genuinely bad in the way a murderer’s poetry would be, which is a deliberate and difficult effect to achieve.
The fragmentation defeats some readers entirely, and the ones it works on tend to rate it his best.
Not the entry point.
Everything the Darkness Eats (2022)
His first full-length novel, set in a small Connecticut town where people have been disappearing.
Ghost Hansen lost his wife and daughter and is barely functioning. Heart Crowley is an elderly man in the town performing something in his house that requires people. And there is a couple, one of them a police officer, dealing with the aftermath of a hate crime.
The occult material is the weaker half. What Heart is doing has rules and a history, and it’s the most conventional thing LaRocca has written.
The grief and the small-town homophobia are the reason it works, and the sections on Ghost after the accident are as good as anything in his shorter books.
The common verdict runs three ways: the novel length doesn’t suit him, the plot machinery shows, and individual passages are excellent.
His subsequent work has returned to novella length.
The Trees Grew Because I Bled There (2021)
His first collection, eight stories, and the best introduction to the range.
“You’ll Find It’s Like That All Over” is the standout. A man moves into a neighborhood and his elderly neighbor makes a series of escalating requests, each slightly stranger than the last, and the story is about how difficult it is to refuse somebody politely.
“The Strange Thing We Become” involves a woman with a rare condition and a partner who is caring for her.
The stories are short, the register is uncomfortable rather than frightening, and the recurring subject is a relationship in which one person is asking for more than the other can give and the other keeps agreeing.
That is his actual subject across everything, and the collection makes it clearer than the novellas do.
It was a Bram Stoker Award finalist and it is cheap.
At Dark, I Become Loathsome (2025)
Ashley Lutin performs a service. He buries people alive, briefly, in a controlled way, and digs them up again, and they report feeling reborn afterwards.
His wife died of cancer and his son disappeared, and he has been doing this since.
Then a client asks for something else.
It is his most controlled book and the one where the emotional material and the transgressive material finally join up rather than sitting beside each other. The burial ritual is genuinely well constructed, the grief is specific, and the client’s request is disclosed at exactly the right point.
There is body horror in it and it is not the point.
It gets called his best novel and the strongest argument that he’s more than the reputation from the first novella, and several reviewers who had written him off revised their position.
Published in 2025.
What to Expect, Honestly
The prose is mannered on purpose. Archaic constructions, formal register, characters who speak in a way nobody speaks. It’s a deliberate effect, and it’s the single most common complaint readers file.
The content warnings are accurate. Body horror, sexual violence, self-harm and animal harm appear across the work, and the front matter tends to be specific about which. Read it.
And the books are short, which means a failed experiment costs you an evening rather than a week. That is a genuine argument for trying him even if the description sounds off-putting.
Where to Start
Read Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, read the content warnings at the front rather than skipping them, and then decide if he’s for you or not.
If the register works on you, read We Can Never Leave This Place, which is the better novella.
If you want the range, read The Trees Grew Because I Bled There.
And come to the novels last, because the short forms are where the Eric LaRocca books are strongest and the long ones are where the style starts to cost him.
For the wider canon, see my horror classics page. Where he lands among the genuinely upsetting is on my disturbing books list.
