‘Everything the Darkness Eats’ Review: Eric LaRocca’s Debut Novel is a Queer Horror Triumph
Mike Salinas
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Life throws curveballs. You swing and miss—a lot. But the bat you’ve been given is too heavy, the pitcher is on steroids, and you’ve never actually played baseball before. The game feels rigged before you even step on the field. Eric LaRocca’s debut novel, Everything the Darkness Eats, calls to mind that feeling and the unique voice inside your head that wonders why God, if such a thing exists, hates you so goddamn much.
You know the one.
It scrapes the inside of your skull with a whispering doubt. It tells you all the reasons you don’t deserve to be happy. It’s neither devil nor angel but a gray cloud that follows you on a sunny day like a cartoon, drowning you in darkness.
Sound familiar?
LaRocca, whose previous novellas, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood, established him as a promising new voice of genre fiction, has crafted a debut novel that is both broad in scope and narrow in focus. Everything the Darkness Eats doesn’t shy away from the kind of nebulous, abstract horrors that stretch your imagination with Lovecraftian prowess. But, it never lets you forget what the book is really about: being human.
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In the town of Henley’s Edge, people are disappearing, but two residents named Malik and Ghost (“Like the thing that goes ‘boo.’”) have never truly felt visible. They struggle with a world that sees them as the other, as monsters, because of their sexuality and the traumas that mar them inside and out. The two carry their scars on their flesh and in silent suffering, but old wounds soon reopen (as well as plenty of new ones) when they cross paths with a mysterious older gentleman who seeks to wield a power no mortal was ever meant to possess.
There’s a profound sadness that permeates throughout the novel. LaRocca writes poignantly of the darker aspects of the queer experience (self-hatred, fear, isolation) but also of a universal sense of loneliness and desperation. For instance, the manner in which he captures the desolation of age for an older woman character, to look back upon one’s life and feel regret, made me put down the book and text my mom. It broke my heart.
The novel is an exercise in pondering the age-old, theological questions: Why did God make us, and why must we suffer? Thankfully, LaRocca makes it an enjoyable trek through that ponderance. While Everything the Darkness Eats can be a depressing book, it is far from a slog.
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Sitting at under three-hundred pages, the novel is lean and mean. It takes off from the first page with kinetic energy. If I gave the impression that this book lacks thrills and spills, let me reassure you that no other author in contemporary horror drenches a page in blood like LaRocca—and I don’t mean in quantity or shock value. He writes violence with the nimble prose of a 19th-century French poet and has a penchant for ending chapters that punch directly in the gut and leave you with nothing but lingering dread. Fans of The Damnation Game by Clive Barker and Nicole Cushing’s Mr. Suicide will find traces of those works’ DNA throughout, but Everyhing the Darkness Eats remains refreshing and completely its own.
The fantasy nerd in me did want more from the world LaRocca created here. He purposely pulls back from spoon-feeding the reader information regarding the supernatural entities and gods of unknown origins that populate the pages, but I wanted a slightly larger taste.
However, perhaps I’m just conditioned by our cultural landscape of shared universes and literal encyclopedias written on fictional worlds and creatures. I needed to remind myself that the otherworldly horrors are not the story here. It might have been tempting to deviate from the course and expand upon the lore and mythos, but LaRocca keeps the focus where it belongs: the human characters.
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Everything the Darkness Eats is, at times, as bleak as the title suggests, but LaRocca threads a strand of hope throughout. This is not a work of nihilism, and you’re not left feeling empty upon completion. It’s a novel that will resonate with anyone who struggles with that gray cloud and its downpour of torrential darkness.
LaRocca assures us that there is utility in the void. It can make us stronger and equip us for the failure and disappointment that life so often throws our way.
Because even if we swing and miss over and over again, we still hold the bat. If the roided-out pitcher throws you some chin music, sometimes all you have to do is charge the mound and take out a kneecap or two.
Everything The Darkness Hits releases on June 13, 2023. Pre-order your copy here.
Follow Mike Salinas’ zine on Instagram @darkdeadthings.
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