Everything the Darkness Eats is, as the title suggests, dark. Eric LaRocca is such a talented author and I never hesitate to pick up his work. I really enjoyed this one, more so than the last few short story collections, this one might even be my favorite. As with his norm there’s tons of triggers but that’s never deterred me, in fact I prefer it. Also, he always has the coolest titles, in my opinion.

At the beginning of the book, we have what set the story into motion. It’s just a little bit of foreshadowing so I was still left with questions. With multiple viewpoints going on, I was wondering how they all tied in together, but they do so, so hang in there. I read this is one sitting, because I simply just couldn’t put it down. I’m not sure how I feel about the ending yet, I’m going to be left thinking about it for a while. Thanks to the author and publisher for my eARC. Everything the Darkness Eats will be published next month.

I had previously read a few novellas by Larocca, and loved them all. I held high hopes for this novel and it did not let me down. It is beautifully written and I would definitely recommend this one!

"Everything the Darkness Eats" is black, black, black, like the cover of the book, like the contents of the book. For a long minute there I completely considered that there didn't seem to be a single speck of lightness in this book, that it was populated with people swimming in dark currents, victims of circumstance or chance, or worse, the evil, malicious characters who also peopled this book.

But then, a single, solitary wisp of a character made its single, solitary play, and I felt that all was right in the world.

This book was amazingly good. Bleak, but amazingly good.

My thanks to Netgalley for allowing me a sneak peek read for the amazingly talented Eric LaRocca. My opinions expressed here are solely my own.

4.5/5 I’m glad I gave LaRocca another chance after not being overly impressed with ‘You’ve lost A lot of Blood’. EVERYTHING THE DARKNESS EATS was exquisitely written. I was completely and utterly engulfed in the story from chapter one. Hauntingly beautiful, a reflective horror read the whole way through.

The characters were amazingly written, I found myself caring deeply for the two MCs hoping for them to find peace at the end of their suffering. I loved LaRocca’s interpretation of God and found the premise of this novel incredibly imaginative. Lost a half-point only because I don’t love a happy ending in horror and I felt the end tied a little too nicely together at the end, but again this is only my personal preference. I suspect this will be a very popular read upon its release.

Henley’s Edge is a quiet peaceful town rapidly being consumed by the darkness that lives within the very people that populate it.

I think the writing style above all else is what kept me engaged with this book. There are a couple of stories running parallel to each other and the plot lines connect at the end, but in my opinion they are not woven together in a way that fully explains the “why” for anything. It somehow all felt incomplete.

What stood out to me the most was the topic of the elderly being a forgotten and vulnerable population, I think there is potential to explore a lot of horrific aspects of being an older adult in our society and I love that the author touches on that.

To those who need trigger warnings: Some of the characters go through very traumatic events that could be triggering to other readers such as SA, loss of a loved one and homophobia.

Overall, I would recommend this book to someone who loves prose, magic, social commentary and is maybe just getting into extreme horror.

Thank you to NetGalley and CLASH books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Eric Larocca does it again. Another incredible story. A man meets a woman, who is abducted by a mysterious man. Things then proceed to get progressively more horrible, especially once religion enters the picture. This one feels so much like Clive Barker’s work. There’s great characters, a strong plot and pace, and so much darkness. This book felt twisted and depraved and made me feel the same. Like all his books, this one made me hunger for more of his work.

Another strong work from LaRocca- definitely on my auto buy list going forward. I find he’s always quite good at writing dark without it feeling too heavy.

This book takes a knife and plunges it into your soul.

The different POV’s were interesting and I loved discovering how they would all end up intertwining together. It was so strange and unusual and lovely all at the same time. It made me sad, shocked and pissed off. The things that happen to some of the characters were shocking and hard to read at times but Eric writes with such heart that it makes it worth it in the end. Not for the light of heart, but I say READ IT.

"Ghost figured that the technician knew nothing about invisibility, knew nothing about the unbearable ordeal of being left behind by others or deserted because grief is somehow infectious"


Story/Plot: 3/5
The prologue gipped me right away, however after about 100 pages, I realized that while enjoyable, the plot did leave me wanting something more. There are two stories being shared side by side. The first is of Ghost, who, having lost his family years before is just trying to survive day to day. The second story surrounds Malik and his husband Brett as they deal with malicious neighbors trying to forcefully remove them from the community, simply because they are gay.

The one thing tying these two together is a string of disappearances in town, being conducted by Heart Crowley, the most interesting character in my opinion. I loved the occult nature of the horror, and wanted even more of Crowley and his ambitions.

Both Ghost and Malik get wrapped up in the odd occurrence created by Crowley, and not in ways you'd ever expect. While Ghosts involvement is apparent by about the halfway point, Malik's is not. As a cop he is trying to find the missing people, but that feels like a footnote to his life, as it unravels. I spent 90% of the book confused as to why we followed Malik's view point at all, as it pertains to the overall plot.


Characters: 4/5
Having read other works from LaRocca before, I know that characters are where he excels. Specifically creating haunted characters with deep complex pasts, traumas, and realistic but strange coping mechanisms. As a character reader I love reading these fascinating portrayals of wounded humans trying to obtain their deepest darkest desires. In this novel however, I almost wanted more time with the characters and I wanted some of them to interact more than they did, to create a bigger impact on the ending.

Of all the characters my two favorites were Ghost and Crowley. Ghost, for the somber way his grief and invisibility is portrayed. And Crowley for the occult aspirations he pursues.


Writing:4/5
Eric LaRoccas writing is beautiful, gripping and haunting. He manages to paint vivid pictures at times, and scenes that remain in your memory for a long time. His prose is not overly complex, and easy to read.


Other:
People not familiar with LaRoccas other works, and who are not familiar with the genre of splatterpunk might not fully understand the horror in this book, which relies mainly on shock factor and gore. This is honestly one of his tamer works, but does lack the atmosphere that some horror books build up, because it is still within the realm of splatterpunk to some extent. This book, in the same vein as Lovecraft, does not explain the intricacies of the horror elements. You are left with many unanswered questions, and for me, it left me wanting more.



Final Verdict: 3.75/5 ( rounded to 4)
I will continue to devour Eric Larocca's novels for years to come. His characters are unlike any other and he does not shy away from the dark ugly truths we sometimes lie to ourselves about until they manifest in ugly ways.
This book was a fascinating ride, but left me wanting more answers and a deeper exploration into the relationships between the characters.


Thank you to Eric LaRocca, CLASH books, and NetGalley for this ARC copy of Everything the Darkness Eats!

I like the idea behind this book: dark magic and disappearances in what appears to be a perfect small town. I enjoyed the mystery behind it, but it was a bit slow and disjointed. The ending wasn’t much of a surprise. I was a bit disappointed with this one.

This novella reminded me of the best of the genre: subtle nods to Stephen King and Clive Barker. Overall, though, I found myself wondering why? I couldn’t seem to comprehend the fundamental reason for the plot or story. Eric LaRocca is a master of horror, but this was my least favorite of his so far.

*CWs at the end

“After all, her world was darkness, and that’s often where the monsters feel most at home.”

Thank you to NetGallery and publishers for providing me with an ARC!

To be honest, I feel like there is not enough time in the world to talk about my thoughts on this book.

I'll begin with the most glaring problem: many people do not and will not like the purple prose. I am not one to shy away from excessive analogies and wordy paragraphs (obviously), but I will agree that, in this instance, the writing was try hard. I counted eight “as if” statements in the span of two pages (pages 31-32, for reference). At some point, I feel that the author is just going for denseness for the sake of denseness. Many of the similes are, well:

“Then cringed as if ashamed of such shamelessness.”
“Gemma followed him without comment like a dutiful servant, or a zombified housemaid secured in invisible bondage.”
“. . . a deep crater where little planets had been collected in the world behind her eyes.”

The pacing was incredibly inconsistent. There are five parts in total to this book. The first two parts were relatively slow, but parts 3-5 took off so fast it felt like I was in the passenger seat of a 16-year-old's first car. I also noticed that parts 3-5 seemed to lack the polishing that the first two parts possessed. As I got further and further into the book, the more errors there were: spelling and grammatical errors, sentences that seemed incomplete, and what appears to be an entire scene missing in Chapter 13. I hope the editor gives it another pass before publishing it, because the quality difference is conspicuous.

We have two main POVs, as the summary suggests, with a scattering of supporting character's POVs throughout. It was pretty easy to keep track of the storylines, as they follow very different plots that only really intertwine in the last chapter. Frankly, I am of the opinion that the two storylines were excessive. It was like I was reading two completely different books most of the time. I think that the author was going for a sort of matryoshka doll effect, a religious parable nestled within a more realistic story, but it fell flat for me.

Our main characters are okay. Ghost is going to be hit-and-miss with people. If you cannot stand annoying, angsty characters, you will not enjoy this book. Now, to be clear: I recognize that a protagonist is not necessarily supposed to be likeable, and that that does not reflect on the author’s character! What I am saying is that if are one of these people that wanted to throw Catcher in the Rye out the nearest window, turn away, because Ghost is infuriatingly whiny at times. Malik was alright, but I feel that he and his husband didn't belong in the narrative. Their story would have been better off told through a separate piece, which I will elaborate on later.

As for the story/plot: it's odd, because this is the second LaRocca book I have read, and just like with the first one, I cannot decide what I'm feeling. At the moment, I know it's confusion. I feel like I'm missing something, and not necessarily due to a lack of context on LaRocca's part. The symbolism could be very heavy-handed at times, probably because if it wasn't, every reader would be uncertain about what the book was even about. I think that there is more to it than I'm seeing and understanding, and I am hoping that somebody with a better education in classic art and history can explain it to me. On a surface level, the story is disjointed and perplexing. Nothing seems to line up, and everything feels senseless. There was no point to Malik's story, besides serving as a Chekhov's gun at the very end. There was one chapter, Chapter 20, that was so utterly pointless that I have to wonder why it was included.

Thematically, this novel deals with grief, love, revenge, homophobia, and religion. Malik and Brett's story in particular gets very heavy, so please look at the content warnings if you are sensitive to certain topics. I know that their part is going to be the most controversial thing about this book by far. Personally, I actually think that their story was (for the most part) well-crafted and very relevant to our current political climate, particularly when it comes to conservative small towns, "justifiable" violence, and the conflation of grooming with the LGBTQ+ community. The scenes of hate crime were extremely harsh and difficult to read, but this is the unfortunate lived experience of many queer people. I know this personally, and I imagine the author, as a gay man, does as well. For many right now in America, our lives are not all hunky-dory happy gay times, and I think LaRocca wanted to talk about that. There is nothing inherently wrong with writing about homophobia, or homophobic violence, or the many terrible things that come with that, especially when it comes down to a gay author in a gay relationship sharing his perspective. That said, the ending completely erased the purpose of their story. I hate to say this, but nothing they went through mattered at the end, and that made the very violent scenes seem pointless. They would have been better off with their own novella, preferably with an ending that didn't conveniently cut the ties for them.

Another 2 stars for LaRocca. I can't believe I'm saying this, but the suggestion of a larger word count was a bad idea. One of these days, I am praying he is going to blow me out of the water with a good book. Fingers crossed on They Were Here Before Us.

CWs:<spoiler>Death of an unborn child, spousal death, car crash, sacrilege, hate crimes, slurs, kidnapping, CSA, rape, gang-rape, AIDs</spoiler>

This book had excellent imagery and some interesting character premises, but the action was too divided amongst various characters to make sense to me. The pacing was also off; there was too much build up and then very little resolution.

This is my third strike for LaRocca's work, and this time I'm truly throwing in the towel. I thought maybe a full-length work might give him time to develop some of the characters and ideas more than in his short fiction but that was not the case. I didn't end up finishing this one because it was just too dull and seemed like it was trying to do something that never manifested.

This was cute and all, but 𝘚𝘶𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘪𝘢 did it better.

Upon finishing, I wondered if this was for YA because I felt the language was meant for a teenager. I was surprised to find it's for adults, unless LaRocca writes for adults who still shop at Hot Topic. Or, lord have mercy, Spencer's.

In a scene in which the best horror aspects occur, LaRocca writes:

"He thought of such things as he closed his palm tightly and squished the life out of the tiny black slug until it was smeared along the palm of his hand like toothpaste."

Excuse me, toothpaste? How toothpaste as a tonal simile works within a scene where the Gothic and gore occur astounds me. Either LaRocca needs to leave the immaturity of the overuse of similes much like these that overcrowd this work without any real literary merit or they go back to at least CW200 for prose/stylist classes.

Near the end, LaRocca explores themes of queer identity and religion, but shallowly does so by victimizing the queer body through senseless violence and repetitive rhetorical questions that scrape the surface of the diction meaning of 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘦. The violence then comes off as a cheap thrill that make this subpar, a B-horror read.

Additional star for the fun of the story, though there really isn't much of it in this dull queer Gothic horror.

In 2018, a movie called "Spiral" came out with a very similar premise to "Everything the Darkness Eats:" a gay couple (one of them even named Malik) moves to a small town, and is targeted by their homophobic neighbours, as the supernatural underbelly of their surroundings slowly reveals itself. That movie didn't work for me in much the same way that "Everything The Darkness Eats" didn't: it was in such a rush to get to its conclusion, it neglected the journey. The publisher bills this as the first full-length novel from LaRocca, but honestly, it barely fits that bill: my ARC was 160 pages, and Goodreads tells me that the print copy is 202 pages. That's simply not enough time or space to properly develop the characters or the storylines, especially when the book has two stories running parallel. To get around this, LaRocca spends a lot of time simply telling us what the characters are thinking ("Ghost felt sad," "Malik felt angry,") and then piling some similies on top to garnish it. It's clunky, and it doesn't work. This book feels - to be blunt - like a rush job, and that might be the worst possible outcome in a genre that relies so much on a slow-burn build of tension. Once we hit the past fifty or so pages, the gore and violence starts piling up, but it doesn't really do anything to make up for the previous 3/4ths of the book or inspire a sense of lingering horror. It just feels like a last, desperate attempt to leave an impression.

I went into this book expecting a very different kind of horror than I got out of it...
This is a quick single-sitting type read (around 150-ish pages) but the actual story could have been less than 30 pages if there weren't constant metaphors sprinkled every other line. This will bother many people, but I actually enjoyed the author's tyle of writing with this book. I feel like the drawn out and detailed thoughts were necessary for the character building as they have very immense internal struggles.

On to the actual story....

Starting with characters, there are three main people, all queer men, all with different backgrounds and lives. Malik is an officer who faces a lot of homophobia, including a gang-rape. Many people have issue with this inclusion in the book, I do not. I understand what the author is portraying with the rampant homophobia and hints of religious trauma, the horror here is less about actual supernatural entities and more about the real daily realities for queer folk. I don't have enough space in the world to really go into the depth of that alone, but it is the only actual horror I got from this book.

Crowley is another main character, and aside from selling funeral plots and abducting people with his very obvious car and getting away with it- he has powers that are reminiscent of a demon. This is just about the only drop of creepy horror in the entire book, and it wasn't enough to sustain the story. The character building with Crowley is incredibly minimal compared to our other mains. How on earth does the book not include Malik deeply investigating the missing people? This would have tied the story together better than the strange plot line that occurred instead.

Ghost... I feel like he's the biggest character and had the most potential, but fell SO SO short. Ghost was the driver in the accident that killed his wife and unborn baby. He carries this guilt deeply. He meets a young blind girl named Piper and becomes fixated on her. I wanted to love Ghost but became very annoyed when his lovely thought prose disappeared instantly when he met Piper. The writing I enjoyed at the beginning, I realized only happened when he was in thought. He had no idea how to conversate and carry himself around people, and it just became too unrealistic, too fast.

Anyway, Crowley- not a great guy, steals people, nobody notices him rolling around in his car abducting people apparently. Malik- obviously too focused on his own issues to be a cop when it pertains to other crimes other than homophobia. Ghost, this guy has some serious trauma and it spills out everywhere.

None of these stories intersected in a way that didn't feel forced, the ending was predictable, and there were WAY too many oversights regarding the characters and their behavior,
and the lack of anyone using common sense.
Some of those that come to mind:
A man walks up to my child in a hospital and tries to talk to her a bit too strangely and I'm going to walk away, not force her to talk and give the man my number. Also no child this age goes off alone without their parent, especially when they can't see. It's as if no one that has ever had a child at a hospital, doctor office, or literally anywhere read over this before it went straight to publishing. A child missing in a very obvious way? Check security footage, call police if something seems off about people that climb in your taxi. DON'T GO IN THE BASEMENT OF THE MAN THAT SELLS FUNERAL PLOTS.

It was as if random ideas were very messily thrown together to create this book. I forced myself to keep reading to see it through, but lost the actual desire to early on. I just think this one was a miss, and very unlike the author's other popular titles which feel much different.

The author has so much potential for beautifully horrific stories, the prose and bits of darkness are there. I did really like the not-so-subtle religious and queer trauma. As a queer atheist person myself, I appreciate the subliminal messages conveyed throughout. We need the variance in characters as well, queer villains included. I think the inclusion of disabled characters was a nice change as well, but I think there needs to be quite a bit of work on how to portray these characters more accurately. Piper's blindness almost felt like an afterthought and maybe a bit stereotypical.

Thanks to NetGalley and the author for allowing me to read and review this!

after loving THGWSWLS, i am incredibly disappointed to say that i hated this book…

larocca is an author who is incredibly gifted in writing prose, but i think this book serves as an example that there has to be so much more than for a novel to be successful.

to put it simply i think this book was boring and had nothing to say. none of the things that happened meant anything at all, which makes me wonder why i even read it in the first place. for this being a horror novel, i don’t believe there was nearly any horror elements to actually create intrigue. the events that were included in the end were horribly unnecessary and in my opinion are just not representative of the genre. they were terrible for the sake of being terrible. it really left a bad taste in my mouth the way that these scenes were written. especially because i’ve always praised larocca of writing queer horror that doesn’t use homophobia as it’s vehicle.

outside of my suffering from boredom and the ending chapters of this story, i just didn’t like the way this story was set up. the different povs did very little for the story at all. including more than one pov took away from the most interesting character in the book. i don’t think the author really explored a lot of the potential in ghost. he has experienced so much grief and had such a cool supernatural element in the story that went undeveloped.

i can say with 100% certainty i wouldn’t have made it past part 2 if i didn’t have to review this arc. i wish i wouldn’t have read this book and in my mind (although finishing it) it feels like a dnf.

thank you to netgalley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to review this ARC copy.

I have never been so excited to be approved for an ARC before! Eric LaRocca quickly became one of my favourite authors last year when I was introduced to "Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes". I nominated that one as my favourite release of the year at my library, so you could say that my expectations for follow up books were high.

AND BOY WERE THEY MET.

Everything The Darkness Eats was everything I wanted and more. Perfectly macabre and yet I loved the ethereal mysticism that was in play as well. I will forever be in awe of the way LaRocca can describe simple everyday things in a manner that leaves you feeling cracked open and raw.

Needless to say, I loved it. I can now cancel my hold request at my library and send it straight to my staff picks instead.

This is my first Eric LaRocca book and I will say, I was so confused at the beginning. It felt like there were random words put together to create a story that I just couldn't follow. The idea of the book was incredible, it's the reason I applied for it. But overall, this book wasn't for me.