
Member Reviews

We Are Always Tender With Our Dead
Eric Larocca
4.5 / 5
I've loved MOST of Eric Larocca's writing, but I had always preferred their short stories. Their first full length novel Everything The Darkness Eats wasn't for me at all, and their novella You've Lost A Lot of Blood was enjoyable, but thoroughly confused me.
His last novel At Dark I Become Loathsome was the first full length novel I'd thoroughly enjoyed as much as I enjoy their shorts.
But this novel, which is book one of what's going to be a trilogy, was the best book I've read this year. (And this was the 89th book I've read this year.)
I enjoyed how much heart the horror held.
Love hurts ... bigotry hurts ....and Eric has such a beautifully macabre way of showing us visual aides, through his words.
This book hurts you and holds you simultaneously.
I can't wait for the next part!
Highly recommend!

In the isolated town of Burnt Sparrow, NH, Christmas morning turns tragic when three faceless figures commit a horrific act of violence. As the community mourns, young Rupert faces harsh family truths. Entangled relationships lead to more chaos, teaching the townsfolk about the futility of revenge and the necessity of respecting boundaries. LaRocca's gripping and atmospheric narrative delves into the dark heart of this New England town, leaving readers chilled and eager for more.

This is honestly a very difficult book to review. It is extremely well written, accomplishes so much in a very short page count, and is a truly visceral experience. I also never want to think about it again. The subject matter is grotesque, and it's meant to be envelope and boundary pushing and it succeeds extremely well at this. I'm not sure what the symbolism or allegory is here, and I will be mulling that over, but on the surface this is just depravity and human monsters at their darkest, most primal, and horrifying. Again, LaRocca does this very, very well, but it is even more divisive than At Dark I Become Loathsome, which was a really tough book. Eric LaRocca is a truly talented writer, but his books are rough.

I've been reading Eric LaRocca for a while, and I've always noticed the similarities between his work and the work of Clive Barker. This one feels wholly unique and wholly LaRocca. It takes an inciting incident and mixes it with a series of human depravities to create a beautiful, twisted story that sets up a trilogy that I can't wait to continue. Short stories are woven within and some epistolary stuff between chapters adds to the town's lore. Additionally, each relationship is so complex, creating a tangled web that makes me feel like I'm going to be thinking about this book for a long time -- probably until the next book comes out.

I’m unsure as to whether I can do this book justice with a review.
It transcends pigeonholing or synopsis, as it’s so damned sprawling, yet at the same time completely claustrophobic – and damned. Laden with unuttered words and littered with shattered hopes, it’s not a book for the faint hearted.
But it is a thing of visceral, dominant beauty. Intelligently hewn queer horror, guts and blood, sexual longing, taboos and yearning amidst layers of trauma and regret.
The good people are losing and the bad people have a choke hold on the small town of Burnt Sparrow. The Elders rule the roost and read entrails to tell the future. Murderers have no features on their face, just a pinprick hole that whimpers as the town folk torture them. Corpses are both guarded where they fell, yet fair game in this book.
It’s like nothing I have read before. I adored it.
Brought up on James Herbert and then an early, teenage adopter of Clive Barker as he wove his magic into the world as his confidence grew, my tastes in books are dark, dirty and not easily shook. This book pushed those boundaries, and I am all the better for it on the other side of it.
Atmospheric, suffocating, hopeless and achingly sad at times, I beseech all horror fans to pick this book up and meet the people (and beings) of Burnt Sparrow. I cannot wait for the next 2 instalments.
Titan Books and Eric Larocca, thank you for the privilege of reading this advanced copy.

Absolutely incredible. Exactly what I expected from LaRocca. Just as disturbing, but is that not what horror is? Pushing the boundaries, aiming to make you feel abject disgust.

Reading We Are Always Tender with Our Dead felt like pressing my hand to a wound—intimate, painful, and impossible to forget. Eric LaRocca has always had a way of writing horror that’s less about jump scares and more about emotional rot, the kind of fear that festers just under the skin. This novella takes that approach and sharpens it into something absolutely devastating.
I went into it expecting darkness—and I got it. But what I didn’t expect was how tender and heartbreaking that darkness would be. This is horror at its most personal. LaRocca explores grief, obsession, and identity in a way that’s as poetic as it is disturbing. The prose is beautiful—lush, lyrical, and precise—and it only makes the violence and sadness hit harder. Every line feels like it’s cutting both ways: elegant and brutal.
The story unfolds with a kind of dream-logic, or maybe a nightmare-logic—where everything makes emotional sense even when the rules of the world are slipping. There were moments that genuinely unsettled me, not because of what was happening on the page, but because of how deeply it reflected parts of myself I don’t always want to look at.
LaRocca has this rare ability to make horror feel sacred, like a ritual of uncovering the worst parts of being human—loneliness, guilt, longing—and showing us the terrible beauty in them. We Are Always Tender with Our Dead is painful. It’s grotesque. But it’s also soft in a way that I don’t often find in horror. It doesn’t flinch, but it feels.
If you’ve read LaRocca before, you know what you’re in for: body horror wrapped in elegy, queerness explored through dread, and a voice that dares you to keep reading even when it hurts. If you haven’t—this is a bold, unforgettable place to start.

Thank you, NetGalley and Titan Books for allowing me to read this book early. The opinion in this review is my own.
This is the first full-length novel I’ve read by LaRocca. I’ve only read his short stories, so I had a vague idea of what to expect. In true LaRocca fashion, this book was gory, traumatic, and disturbing. The characters have lots of depth and you easily become invested. His writing is a mix of splatter-punk with amazing prose. It’s the start of a series, and a lot was left unanswered. It’s hard to know if that’s by design in preparation for the next book but it felt almost incomplete. He is a master of short-form writing, but I’m unsure about his longer forms. If you find splatter-punk entertaining, then I would recommend this book to you.

I’m not quite sure how to describe this book. It’s my first by the author, but his reputation precdes him. I knew tk expect violence, and violence was definitely there. However, I didn’t expect to finish a book not really knowing what I had just read. There were true moments of brilliance, an astute insight into the consequences of human suffering which, at times, left me stunned. However, there were aspects that I didn’t truly see the purpose of - perhaps they will be addressed in the next book? I will definitely read on, if nothing else to find answers so my questions.
The writing was excellent, the commentary on suffering horrifying and true, and it has guaranteed I will read on.

i will be the first to admit that i will devour anything that larocca writes, and i didn't really know what to expect going into this one. what followed was an absolute whirlwind of monstrosity, grotesquerie, and in/human depravity that i cannot even describe. larocca's ability to depict the most brutal, abject terrors with such gorgeous prose is astounding. i cannot wait to see more of the town of burnt sparrow!

As much as I love LaRocca's stuff, this one just didn't do it for me.
The plot is great, the characters are three dimensional, etc...
It just seems like a novella's-worth of action happened in a novel-length work. The prose is slow and brooding (which isn't "bad" per se), but it was a little slow and methodical for my tastes.

The way this was marketed was giving me folk horror vibes, which I enjoy, but half way through the book I realised that this story is splatterpunk, with women and corpses (of women) being violated for no reason which isn't my vibe. I didn't read further as there was nothing else happening to convince me to.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review!!
I have given up rating Eric’s books. I never know how I feel afterward. Eric LaRocca is an auto-read author for me and I’m always ready to be sickened once again. Eric has such a talent for writing stories that are fascinating in their brutality. The list of trigger warnings in the beginning of this book was impressive and I’m glad I read it so I wouldn’t be surprised. This book was gross. While the beginning was slow, it got so weird so fast. What kind of nightmare town is this?! I completely understand Rupert wanting to leave. Everyone was a wacko.
We get multiple news stories mixed in with the POVs of Rupert, a teenage boy who’s trying to get by and leave town after the death of his mother and Gladys, the wife of a influential and cruel man in town. Their lives will mix together after a family of faceless human like creatures invade town on Christmas and gun down townsfolk during a parade. What happens after will change Rupert and Gladys forever.
There’s a lot of interesting messages here. How grief and trauma can turn you into a monster. How hurting those who have wronged you can make you just as bad as they are. This is a trilogy of novels and while this story was weird and disgusting, it also kept my attention. I’d be willing to finish out the series.