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Things Have Gotten Worse
Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes
by Eric LaRocca
Titan, $17.99, 288pp
Published: September 2023

Technically, my Books of Horror Go To List selection for October is only part of this book, because it was previously published as a standalone novella. However, given that my copy features two other stories alongside it, I might as well review those too. I'm happy about that, because as powerful as the title novella is, it could easily be considered a gimmick piece, while the others here play out in a very different way, so it's a better representation of what Eric LaRocca does. I'll cover the three backwards, which also means in increasing size and increasing impact.

The third of these pieces is 'You'll Find It's Like That All Over', a twenty-six-page short story firmly in the vein of anthology TV episodes. I could imagine this as a 'Twilight Zone' story, as it does two distinct things in a stylish way. One is the surface, in which Rafe Perlzig plays with Gerald Fowler in a strange way for no apparent reason. The other is the depth, which looks at what we're willing to do to gain acceptance.

Fowler is a gay man, which may only be important because gay men are not traditionally accepted by society and so might play into his motivation. However, his husband is a racist, which in turn may only be important because the protagonist is a Bosnian immigrant who he doesn't accept. Fowler is therefore seeking acceptance but may only feel accepted by someone who isn't very accepting. It's a stretch to see all this as build, because it's over in a couple of asides, but it may be all there is.

Otherwise, he finds a bone in his yard that has a pair of initials on it and he assumes that RP must stand for Rafe Perlzig, so he wanders over to his neighbour to find out what's going on. Perlzig is a Faustian sort of character who throws him an odd bet out of nowhere. If Fowler can clear the snow off his car in under three minutes, he'll get five hundred bucks. Fowler wins and the bets escalate, until we start to wonder just how obliging this gay man with a racist husband will become.

I found this the weakest of the three stories, not because it didn't have anything but because I felt it should have had more. The theme was relatively weak and the backdrop is weaker, both of which could have been bulked up by making the piece longer. Otherwise the bones are good, a pun that I wasn't expecting to make but I'll take. Length can be important in a story and it's my biggest issue with all of these stories.

The middle piece, 'The Enchantment', is just shy of a hundred pages, so probably counts as a short novella or perhaps a long novelette, but it felt like another short story for a while, only to change into something else on the turn of a dime. Milo gets home to a pair of surprises. For one, his parents are throwing him a surprise seventeenth birthday party. For the other, that's both parents, because they are clearly having problems. Olive opens the door to James coming back but his response is to finalise papers for their divorce. No wonder Milo's a bit messed up.

What I didn't like here was how obviously things go in this short story. Milo's a bit of a Jesus freak. He prays a lot, he practically worships his mother's portrait of Jesus and he's making a crucifix for a school project, a life size crucifix. For some reason, his dad's present is a golden hammer and not one reader is going to be surprised when Milo crucifies himself in his bedroom, hammering in the nails himself in some way that I can't explain. Think about it. If you had nailed one of your hands to a cross, how do you do the same to the other one? Contortionism?

Anyway, everything's entirely predictable and the story's over and done. Except it isn't. LaRocca is just getting started. Six months later, the Thorntons—this is neatly the first time we see the name—are still together, because that was Milo's final wish to them, and they're somehow comfortable enough spending the winter together on Temple Island, ten miles off the New Hampshire coast, as the caretakers for the Enchantment Hotel. That's dedication. Maybe they're seeking the isolation to work on their marriage, but it seems a little extreme to try that without any way to back out at any point in between.

So, of course, that becomes a thing almost immediately, because, even though they are planning to not see a single soul all winter, an unexpected guest promptly shows up in the form of James's son by a previous marriage. Why, we have no idea, but Olive, who's still fervently religious even in the wake of her son's suicide, starts to believe that he's an angel and all sorts of weirdness starts to go down.

I liked that weirdness and I liked how it shook everything up. I didn't like much of the rest, because the characters aren't particularly sympathetic, even when they're clearly supposed to be, and I'm not quite sure what point LaRocca was trying to make. There are a lot of ways to read this one and some involve assuming that nothing's real after Milo's death. Once I got to that point, I wondered if that even happened and this is all just some metaphor for the breakdown of a marriage, with an overt religious angle mixed in for flavour.

What I really liked was the main novella, 'Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke', even if it's a lot skimpier than it might seem at a hundred and fifty or so pages. That's because it unfolds as a set of evidence, presented by the author as if it's a real case, so that we can each come to our conclusions as to why Agnes Petrella met an untimely end at only twenty-four. Given that we know that from the author's note at the beginning and there's only one other character, Zoe Cross, we'd perhaps be forgiven for thinking that this is as predictable as the Milo arc in 'The Enchantment'. I am very happy to say that it isn't.

I'm also happy to say that this approach works particularly well at bringing us into the story, as the third character. Nominally, it's all on us to figure out who's to blame, when of course it's never that simple, but what LaRocca is really doing is asking us what we'd do at any point in what unfolds. If it was us, in either role, would we have done what they do? Do we have sympathy for either or both? When does that sympathy vanish? What baggage would we bring to the table? And, given that the two characters never actually meet in person, how does that factor into our answers?

Maybe that final question is more overt for me because I spent a pivotal part of my life as part of an online community. I got to know a lot of very different people, albeit with a common passion. I got close to a few, in different ways. I travelled around North America for three months meeting a lot of these people and spending time with them. I even married one of them and boxed up my life to be with her on another continent. Spoiler alert; we're still happily married twenty years later.

So I know people who pretended to be other people, hiding behind the anonymity of a name on a screen. I met people who didn't look remotely like their photo. I learned that, however deeply we think we know someone online, they may be someone else in person. That isn't made a big theme here, but it hovers over the entire novella. Are either of the characters who they seem to be? We could fairly answer LaRocca's attempts to bring us into the story by saying "insufficient data".

What we know for sure—or do we?—is that Agnes is struggling financially and so needs to sell her grandmother's antique apple peeler. It's a family heirloom and her grandmother has taken on an important role in her memory now that she's been rejected by her mother for being gay. But she's advertising it for sale and Zoe is interested. LaRocca shows us this in Agnes's advert on a message board on a queer community site, then a set of e-mail correspondence as Zoe answers and offers her sympathy along with buying the peeler. In the end she pays four times the price and even lets her keep the peeler because it clearly means so much to her. Zoe must be a very nice girl.

Well, needless to say, things escalate and I'm not going to tell you how, but I will say that, as their correspondence shifts to instant messaging chats, it gets more manipulative, inappropriately so, and we can easily come to early conclusions. However, LaRocca has zero interest in setting this up to be a simple story with an easy judgement call on our part. This is nuanced and I appreciate how he kept me on the hop throughout, all the way to the ending. I'm still thinking through the many ramifications.

The biggest problem is, perhaps, inherent, which is its length. It sounds substantial at a hundred and fifty pages, but the approach means that we don't read many of the words. Sure, we read the e-mail headers and IM handles once, but we soon start to skip over them, just as we skip over the white space in between each e-mail, because LaRocca keeps them in isolation on their own pages rather than as a flowing thread. The length is surely why this escalates just like that, which is not entirely unrealistic to anyone who's forged a close relationship online, but may seem that way to readers who haven't. Had it been longer, maybe that could have been more nuanced to meet the more common mindset.

So I left the story not only thinking about how to allocate blame and how I think I'd have reacted in these situations, on either side, but that the piece ought to have been a novel. The catch is that a gimmick that might work at novella length might not at another length, and I have no doubt that LaRocca thought long and hard about that. Maybe he was right and we just have to accept how it moves from Lifetime Channel decency to Shudder WTF? Did it just do that? Yes, it just did that! Oh my goodness!

The bottom line is that I'm OK with it but I can see why others wouldn't be. And I'm not as OK with it in the other two stories. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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