Richo Reviews: Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes, Eric LaRocca (Titan Books, 2022)

 The two novellas and one short story that make up this collection are simultaneously very different in theme, and yet unified. The eponymous novella tells the story, through emails and IM chat logs, of two women who meet on a LGBT forum and begin an online relationship that - as we are informed from the off, these records apparently being considered as evidence relating to the death of one of the women - careers towards something very dark. The second novella, The Enchantment, follows two people grieving in a world in which the afterlife has apparently been scientifically disproved. The final story is about a man who, worried about impropriety and social norms, is pressured into making increasingly strange bets with a neighbour. So: as LaRocca themself discusses in the afterword, these works deal with themes like the need for human connection, even when it is unhealthy or destructive; the search for meaning in religion and outside it; the ways that social expectations contort our behaviour. LaRocca doesn't shy away from big questions in his work, but these stories never feel like abstract philosophical explorations, or like sermons. They are deeply, disturbingly human, and their horrors are human horrors. It's hard to overstate the rawness of emotion on display here, the darkest corners of our psyches exposed with startlingly bright light.

That isn't to say I don't have criticisms. Things Have Gotten Worse... itself is in a tricky situation - epistolary writing (I'm counting it) can often feel awkward, torn between the need to tell the story and remain true to the form. At first, I admit, I was a little put off by writing that seemed overwrought for emails between strangers, and a lack of variance in the style of each character's communications. But once the novella had me in its grip - and it didn't take long - I was more focused on the beauty of LaRocca's turns of phrase, the effectiveness of his metaphor, and how the richness of their prose envelops the reader as the story becomes a headlong rush towards darkness. That acceleration can come across as quite rapid, needing to fit into a novella length, but it's hard to notice, so effective is LaRocca's writing. By the end of the story I was hunched over in my train seat, gripping the book tight, and barely able to breathe as I reached the harrowing climax. LaRocca compellingly evokes trauma, vulnerability, emotional manipulation and the self-destructive drive that is the dark side of the need for other human beings. This comes across in subtle use of imagery, and in blunt description - because these patterns, these traumas, are things that are both insidious and yet sometimes startlingly clear. Like the characters, sometimes we know how harmful our actions are yet are unable to keep from them; perhaps it is fitting, then, that even as I became more and more horrified at where the story was going, I was unable to keep from chasing its ending.

The second novella, The Enchantment, is on the surface weaker; it certainly isn't the pulse-raising, clamminess-inducing nightmare of the Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. Yet where it is slower, that gives it room to open up meditation on some truly troubling questions. Is it truly better or worse to know there is no afterlife? Is the idea of eternal existence, of reunion in some place beyond this one, a comfort or an existential horror? There are no easy answers here, of course, and LaRocca doesn't pretend to give them, instead giving the reader a variety of viewpoints to spur our own horrors. These questions are given weight and drive by the realism of the characters, and the sincere grounding of their agony as they are forced to confront such quandaries themselves.

Finally, we have the short story You'll Find It's Like That All Over. Of necessity punchier and blunter than the previous piece, it is a pleasingly twisted tale with a Shirley Jackson-esque acidity that interrogates the lengths we will go to in order to not cause offence, to appear normal. Our protagonist's desire not to rock the boat is prefigured in his musings on his marriage and its flaws, but the reader is still unprepared - thrillingly so - to see just what he will go along with for the sake of conformity and politeness. A wonderful coda to the book and a delicious morsel in its own right.

For me though, it's Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke itself that has its fingers clenched around my heart - and I think, deep down, it always will.