From Bram Stoker Award(R) finalist Eric LaRocca, this is devastating, beautifully written horror from one of the genre's most cutting-edge voices. 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. 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. 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. For fans of Kathe Koja, Clive Barker and Stephen Graham Jones. 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. Still, the author’s strong prose does an impressive job anchoring everything on solid ground even as the stories spiral into surrealist grotesquerie. These gore-soaked excesses have difficulty reaching satisfying resolutions the stories’ considerable guts never get a chance to function properly within the collection’s body politic before they are ripped out. A man discovers a mysterious bone with his initials etched into it in “You’ll Find It’s Like That All Over” and engages in an escalating series of wagers with his elderly neighbor, stretching his personal boundaries for the sake of affability. In the Ari Aster–esque “The Enchantment,” a husband and wife grieving the loss of their son under grotesque circumstances become caretakers of a remote island, where they are visited by a strange man who promises either closure or utter damnation. The epistolary title story follows the online relationship between two women as it escalates into increasingly intense submission and domination, culminating in a horrifying event. The three bloody stories of LaRocca’s debut collection, all “tethered by the human need to connect with someone, something else,” explore the nether sides of human relationships, digging into physical and emotional abuse and the lengths to which people will go to stay civil.
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