We Are Always Tender With Our Dead: A Review of Eric LaRocca’s Shocking New Novel

LaRocca isn’t done with the town of Burnt Sparrow yet and despite spending most of the book wishing I could escape the oppressive nightmare of the town, I too am hungry for more. Nevertheless, it is already clear that the author has something to say with this trilogy, starting with: violence begets violence. And for queer people assimilation to that system and its violence can be both a saving grace and their doom. 

We Are Always Tender With Our Dead: A Review of Eric LaRocca’s Shocking New Novel

Some books linger long after you have read them. They work their way under your skin and wrap themselves around your mind to leave little tendrils of unease, discomfort or disgust. Eric LaRocca is an author with a particular talent for this kind of lingering. And their new novel, We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is certainly no exception. 

The town of Burnt Sparrow, New Hampshire (as unusual as its name) is changed forever after a massacre occurs on Christmas morning. The town elders have a bizarre response, choosing to preserve the crime scene exactly as it is and leave the victims where they lie in the street. A family with no faces are blamed for the attack and left to the mercy of the town.

As the tension rises, two protagonists attempt to navigate the senseless violence. One is Rupert Cromwell, a teenager desperate to escape Burnt Sparrow forever, now grappling with what all this reveals about his family. The other is Gladys Esherwood, the wife of a rich man who has volunteered to house the prisoners and punish them for the massacre despite her protestations. 

Eric LaRocca is fast becoming a pillar of horror literature. They are especially known for Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, their debut novella which went viral on TikTok. Since then they have been surpassing themself with each new tale of woe. Although primarily known for their shorter fiction, their first novel Everything The Darkness Eats met success in 2023. We Are Always Tender With Our Dead has the same unspooling dread and well-tended tension as their short fiction but gives them the freedom to play with structure and form.

This is a freedom they take full advantage of. Indeed, there are some deviations from the main plot that feel almost like short stories within the novel. There’s an epistolary element with blog posts detailing other horrors in Burnt Sparrow’s history along with written tape recordings of Rupert’s mother telling him stories, transcripts and more. My personal favourite of these interjections is the police transcript of mysterious events at a warehouse apartment. This moment is written as distilled found footage terror.

The setting is a consistently oppressive and atmospheric character in its own right. Burnt Sparrow feels utterly inescapable, plagued by strange violence and unexplainable creatures. Smog hangs heavy over the town, stinking of sulfur. The jobs have dried up and buildings lie abandoned. It is at once an American midwest ‘everytown’ and a uniquely putrid place. It makes sense then that the trilogy to which this book belongs is named after the town. 

As with the rest of LaRocca’s work, queerness is at its heart. Rupert struggles with his desires for men and the expectations his apparent manhood places upon him. Gladys is in love with her maidservant but too fearful of her husband’s wrath to run away with her. Much of the violence occurring in the town’s history seems to happen around queer people – from the gay couple in the warehouse apartment to the bisexual trans man in the mother’s tale. LaRocca is following in the footsteps of transgressive queer authors like Clive Barker and Poppy Z Brite, comparisons that feel increasingly well-earned with each new release. 

It cannot be ignored that the book comes with a long list of content warnings (including sexual assault, incest and necrophilia) and a further warning from the author that this isn’t a book to read for pleasure. LaRocca states “This novel is not intended to entertain… I hope to provoke, to elicit a reaction from my audience.” With this in mind, it’s hard to consider the new novel anything other than a resounding success.

This is shock horror married to literary writing. Its imagery, as brutal as it is poetic, is sure to provoke, engage and repulse in equal measure. It is at once heavy-handed – giving the town literal faceless, nameless enemies on which to exact suffering – and delightfully complicated.

We Are Always Tender With Our Dead requires some suspension of disbelief. LaRocca builds a darkly fantastical world in which people can exist with no faces, monsters can hover at the edge of doorways and much much more. There are moments of surrealism including potent images like mutated birds with human faces that refuse all food. Some of these moments and images I wished we dwelled on for longer while others I was desperate to look away from. At times it can border on confusing but if you go into it with an open mind and allow the book to take you where it wants, you’ll soon find yourself caught up in its deadly flow. 

If I leave you with one more warning before you go into reading this book it is this: do not expect a cathartic ending here. While readers might hunger for a release from all the tension after sitting through pages of brutality, there is instead a sense that things are unfinished with many questions unanswered and mysteries still to be unspooled.

Some readers may find this unsatisfying but remember this is the first in a series with two more books in the trilogy coming Sept 2026 and Sept 2027. LaRocca isn’t done with the town of Burnt Sparrow yet and despite spending most of the book wishing I could escape the oppressive nightmare of the town, I too am hungry for more. Nevertheless, it is already clear that the author has something to say with this trilogy, starting with: violence begets violence. And for queer people assimilation to that system and its violence can be both a saving grace and their doom. 

We Are Always Tender With Our Dead releases Sept 9 2025. 

We Are Always Tender With Our Dead by Eric LaRocca

Michael McDowell’s Blackwater meets Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show in the disturbing first installment of a new trilogy of intense, visceral, beautifully written queer horror set in a small New England town.

A chilling supernatural tale of transgressive literary horror from the Bram Stoker Award® finalist and Splatterpunk Award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.

The lives of those residing in the isolated town of Burnt Sparrow, New Hampshire, are forever altered after three faceless entities arrive on Christmas morning to perform a brutal act of violence—a senseless tragedy that can never be undone. While the townspeople grieve their losses and grapple with the aftermath of the attack, a young teenage boy named Rupert Cromwell is forced to confront the painful realities of his family situation. Once relationships become intertwined and more carnage ensues as a result of the massacre, the town residents quickly learn that true retribution is futile, cruelty is earned, and certain thresholds must never be crossed no matter what.

Engrossing, atmospheric, and unsettling, this is a devastating story of a small New England community rocked by an unforgivable act of violence. Writing with visceral intensity and profound eloquence, LaRocca journeys deep into the dark heart of Burnt Sparrow, leaving you chilled to the bone and wanting more.

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