whimsydearest

The Trees Grew Because I Bled There by Eric LaRocca is a collection that meditates on grief, estranged relationships, and the pain of watching your loved ones slowly age and die. The stories here unflinchingly explore the darkest part of the human psyche during the most difficult trials of a person’s life. Perhaps due to their length, unfortunately some of the short stories fell flat to me compared to Larocca’s longer works like We Can Never Leave This Place or They Were Here Before Us. The first story especially felt incomplete to me because I lacked enough history between the father and the kid for the ending to pack an emotional punch. However, these are the standouts of the collection for me.  - Bodies Are for Burning. An aunt struggles with her compulsion to set things on fire as she cares for her young niece. This is an unnerving and poignant look at a lesser-talked about aspect of OCD: dealing with intrusive thoughts. - The Strange Thing We Become. Told through an internet ...

Mara is an imaginative teenage girl trying to process the death of her father while living in a war-torn country. However, after a giant spider shows up at her doorstep and offers her family protection in exchange for food and board, Mara begins to grow suspicious of their new guest. In a novella I can best describe as Pan's Labyrinth m eets Kafka's Metamorphosis , We Can Never Leave This Place by Eric LaRocca weaves a nightmarish and haunting tale about the unreliability of memory and how we process trauma and loss. It’s an allegory steeped in magical realism that constantly blurs the lines between what is real and what is imagined. If you set aside its fantastical nature though, this novella, at its core, is an intimate family portrait of a dysfunctional family. Mara has a frayed relationship with her mother, and with the two of them locked up in a house together, their years of pent-up resentment can only reach a boiling point. I think its ultimately this flawed humanness t...

  Martyr Black is a serial killer and writer who mysteriously disappeared with his partner Ambrose.  Years later, a former acquaintance of the two decides to compile a collection of Martyr’s journal entries, audio transcripts, and previously published works in the hopes that it would provide insight into the killer’s mind.  You've Lost a Lot of Blood by Eric LaRocca is a raw and unflinching descent into darkness. This is a multilayered story, a novella within a novella, whose pieces gradually come together by the end.   However, one aspect of the story didn’t quite mesh with the others for me, and that is Martyr’s novella—a techno horror about a video game that may be killing people. I found this storyline less intimate and engrossing perhaps in part because they are in the third-person.  Really, it's the journal entries and the conversations between Martyr and Ambrose that gripped me the most, so I would have personally loved to have seen their messe...