A grieving husband, an urban legend, and a descent into unforgettable darkness.
That doesn’t stop it packing a punch though; if there’s one thing you can rely on from LaRocca, it’s that the killing blow isn’t action or gore, it’s the way you don’t realise he’s ripped your heart out until you see him playing about with it like steaming hot putty in his hands.
Few knives rummage around in your gut as penetratively as LaRocca’s. With ‘Wretch’, he is no longer the rising star of horror. He has risen!
Wretch Review: Eric LaRocca’s Grief Horror and the Reverse Haunting
Reading Eric LaRocca is rather like having an addiction, but where its source is the toxic waste bricks from David Cronenberg’s CRIMES OF THE FUTURE. His latest novel, ‘Wretch’, is actually rather underplayed in comparison to the series he’s recently started, ‘Burnt Sparrow’; the focus is the void within us than the yawning chasm of evils which exists around us. This doesn’t mean LaRocca refrains from throwing punches – there’s one passage that’ll hit you like a scalpel to the eyeball – but should you want a place to start with this master of emotional, under-the-skin disgust, this would be where I recommend you begin.
The premise of ‘Wretch’, sub-headed “The Unbecoming of Porcelain Khaw”, is based around a group of people called the Wretches, whose methods for absolving or coming to terms with their grief is by looking at pictures and searching for resemblances of their dead loved ones. Insert into this the urban myth of Porcelain Khaw as well as a protagonist in the shape of Simeon Link, a widower whose grief over his deceased husband is infecting every plane of his existence, and so begins this macabre, cutting turn of madness!
While on some level a lot of what this novel does is hit “shuffle” on the author’s playlist of ideas he likes to explore, on another, far better level, long-time readers will start to see the “LaRocca-verse” take shape. He intertwines the kind of weird societies that made ‘All The Parts Of You That Won’t Burn Easily’ so alluring, the idea of sexual attraction to art, the emotional potency of objects, and the web-chat forums of ‘Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoken’ and ‘At Dark, I Become Loathsome’; but more than ever before you also get an insight into the mind of ordinary life, at least as it is first presented.
As ever, the character-work is excellent too. For some, I dare say the presentation of invective personalities in the inside-out world here will churn their stomach more than any one set piece or spark of gore. A lot of his fiction does concern ordinary people, but their preoccupations have usually gone on an Odyssey through the realms of subversiveness by the time we humble readers get to them. Instead, the transgressiveness is kind of the footnote reserved for the final third of the book – it’s just a footnote which looms beneath the novel like a cancerous growth. And once it has exploded itself into full being, you certainly won’t forget it.
Apropos of the ending, it culminates the modernised urban legend slant of the novel fiendishly well. At points, it practically forces you not to take the sweet nothings it whispers to you out into the world lest they spread virus-like. The ultimate twist (in literally the final few pages) is maybe a little forced.
Or at a bare minimum it’s like someone’s looked at the novel and decided what the most left-field twist can be, with a little less regard to how sensibly it fits into the narrative. That doesn’t stop it packing a punch though; if there’s one thing you can rely on from LaRocca, it’s that the killing blow isn’t action or gore, it’s the way you don’t realise he’s ripped your heart out until you see him playing about with it like steaming hot putty in his hands.
Few knives rummage around in your gut as penetratively as LaRocca’s. With ‘Wretch’, he is no longer the rising star of horror. He has risen!
Wretch: or, The Unbecoming of Porcelain Khaw by Eric LaRocca
From rising horror star and award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke comes a nightmarish, haunting, tech-Gothic thrill ride about sorrow, memory, and the unabashed complexity of love as a transgressive act.
After his husband dies, Simeon Link finds himself overcome by grief and seeking comfort in an unusual support group called The Wretches, who offer an addictive and dangerous source of relief. They introduce Simeon to a curious figure known as Porcelain Khaw—a man with the ability to let those who are grieving have one last intimate moment with their beloved…for a price.
Hallucinatory, fiendish, and destructively beautiful, Wretch transports us to a world where not everything is as it seems, and those we love may be the ones who haunt us most.
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