In the wake of this new atheistic realism, the characters discuss worldwide mass suicides as just another news story, and Olive’s obsessive faith becomes irrational and pitiful. The story takes place in a world where the concept of an afterlife has very recently been scientifically disproved. While ‘The Enchantment’ doesn’t shine in the way that the previous story does, the way that LaRocca explores Judeo-Christian faith is inspired. ‘The Enchantment’ follows James and Olive who decide to act as live-in caretakers of a hotel during its off season (another example of LaRocca wearing their horror influences on their sleeve) after the suicide of their teenage son. There are moments of this brilliance in the other two stories, but Things Have Gotten Worse… doesn’t again reach the consistent quality of its titular tale. It’s a truly grotesque juxtaposition – beautiful on the one hand, stomach-churning on the other, like something weird and unknowable has wormed its way beneath the tongues of these two women. Though the email form could have tempted LaRocca towards prosaic writing in the name of verisimilitude, Agnes and Zoe speak to one another like poets, even when describing things like the murder and crucifixion of an infant: “He shrieks… like the final pathetic cry of a dying species – a breed on the verge of being swallowed by oblivion” (p.99). Throughout this story, it becomes increasingly clear that the greatest strength of LaRocca’s writing is his tenderness and creative generosity. It is a skillful interplay between the intense psychological trauma of its characters, the sexual simulacrum of online dating, and the unfeeling bureaucracy of legal paperwork – a juxtaposition similarly explored by Nat Ogle’s 2021 novel In the Seeing Hands of Others. The form is familiar, but its narrative is ground-breaking in its exploration of the darker side of online queer ‘safe’ spaces. James’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’, or the always-unsettling ‘The following is edited from real footage…’ at the start of every found footage horror film, ‘Things Have Gotten Worse…’ is a love-letter to established horror forms from the very first word.īut the story isn’t just parroting genre conventions. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, M. The ‘redacted’ content acts as a negative space in the centre of the story an insistence on journalistic integrity that undermines the assumed omnipotence of a fictional voice. The story opens with a plea for its realism, classifying the story as ‘evidence’ to which we have been granted access: ‘… Because the litigation surrounding Zoe Cross’s case remains open at the time of this publication, certain elements of their communication have been redacted or censored at the behest of the Henley’s Edge Police Department’ (p.ii). From there, we read as the couple fall in love, we read their fetishistic contract wherein Agnes agrees to relinquish all control over her finances and decision-making faculties to Zoe, and, slowly but surely, we read as Zoe manipulates, gaslights, and abuses Agnes until the story climaxes into one of the best conceived works of body horror fiction of recent years. We read the couple’s meet-cute on where Agnes is selling an antique apple peeler. The collection still retains an echo of its original form as most of its pages are taken up by the titular story ‘Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke’- a post-internet take on the epistolary form which comprises emails and instant messenger transcripts between Agnes Petrella and Zoe Cross. Somewhere along its journey across the pond, it picked up a new cover and two more short stories – ‘The Enchantment’ and ‘You’ll Find it’s Like That All Over’ – transforming the book from a novella into a short story collection. First published last year in the US by Weirdpunk Books, Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (2022) has made its way to the UK and found a home with Titan Books.
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