At Dark, I Become Loathsome

by Eric LaRocca

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Bestselling author Eric LaRocca returns with a dark, decadent story of loneliness and longing, life and death. With claustrophobic rituals and spine-tingling horror you won't be able to look away from, this is LaRocca at his best.

From Eric LaRocca—Bram Stoker Award–nominated and Splatterpunk Award–winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke—comes At Dark, I Become Loathsome, a grim yet gentle, horrifying yet hopeful, intense tale of death, trauma, and love.

“If you’re reading this, you’ve likely thought that the world would be a better place without you.”

A single line of text, glowing in the darkness of the internet. Written by Ashley Lutin, who has often thought the same—and worse—in the years since his wife died and his young son disappeared. But the peace of the grave is not for him—it’s for those he can help. Ashley has constructed a peculiar ritual for those whose desire to die is at war with their yearning to live a better life.

Struggling to overcome his own endless grief, one night Ashley finds connection with Jinx—a potential candidate for Ashley’s next ritual—who spins a tale both revolting and fascinating. Thus begins a relationship that traps the two men in an ever-tightening spiral of painful revelations, where long-hidden secrets are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light.

Only through pain can we find healing. Only through death can we find new life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798212179027
Publisher:	Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:	01/28/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Eric LaRocca (he/they) is the author of several works of horror and dark fiction including the viral sensation Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. He is an active member of the Horror Writers Association and currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts with his partner.

Editorial Reviews

09/23/2024

This unsubtle outing from LaRocca (Everything the Darkness Eats) follows in the growing trend of queer horror in which the characters’ queerness directly contributes to the manifestation of the horror element. In this case, widower Ashley Lutin, a self-proclaimed “self-loathing bisexual,” is haunted by the disappearance of his eight-year-old son, Bailey, whom he is afraid he drove away by calling a slur in response to perceived feminine behaviors. As a way of coping with his depression, Ashley renders a strange service to those contemplating suicide: he buries clients alive for 30 minutes, then digs them back up. As Ashley learns more of what may have happened to his son, however, the purity of his rituals becomes harder to maintain. The narrative’s graphic and violent sex scenes illustrate Ashley and other characters’ depravity, but there’s disappointingly little substance among all the shock value. Frequent clichés and few genuine scares don’t help. As an extended metaphor for the destruction caused by denying one’s sexuality, this falls flat. Agent: Priya Doraswamy, Lotus Lane Literary. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

When people think of transgressive literature, they all too often think of it as an assault on the reader: external, aggressive, alienating. What makes LaRocca’s work so effective is not only how transgressive it is but how humane it is. These are not transgressions you can stand outside of. Instead, because of his skill reeling us into close proximity with the characters, the transgressions feel intimate, almost as if we were in the process of committing them ourselves. Which makes them all the more relatable, and all the more alarming.”

author of Last Days and Song for the Unraveling of Brian Evenson

At Dark, I Become Loathsome continues to prove that LaRocca is a master navigator of the beautiful and the grotesque, plumbing the darkest, maddest depths of the human heart and retrieving from within all the grief and all the guilt the heart can hold. If there is a greatest strength here—in a book full of them—it is that LaRocca writes with an unswerving attention to the empathy of his characters, caring about them, even when they are, as the title suggests, loathsome.”

author of The Book of Accidents and Black River Or Chuck Wendig

A haunting and visceral exploration of identity, guilt, and the body, all wrapped in the author’s signature blend of horror and emotional rawness…For readers who appreciate horror that pushes the envelope and forces them to confront uncomfortable truths, At Dark, I Become Loathsome is an essential work.”

Horror World

Some novels give you nightmares, while others give you scars. With At Dark, I Become Loathsome, LaRocca delivers both without mercy. Full of human darkness, screaming with broken humanity … you may not be ready for this book. But it’s waiting for you. Nobody gets under my skin like Eric LaRocca. At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a book you cannot unread.”

New York Times bestselling author of The House of Christopher Golden

At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a genuinely disturbing matryoshka doll of a novel that honors the tie binding grief and our darkest impulses. This is LaRocca’s best book yet.”

author of Horror Movie Paul Tremblay

★ 10/01/2024

LaRocca (Everything the Darkness Eats) presents his most accessible book yet—a stunning, immersive, and relatable tale about the unbearable anguish of grief. Ashley performs "fake death" rituals. People who desperately want to rekindle their will to live hire him to bury them alive for 30 minutes. Bringing others to the brink of death and back again helps Ashley ease the pain of living in a state of perpetual grief due to the death of his beloved wife from cancer and the unsolved kidnapping of his young son. As his son's birthday approaches, Ashley is contacted by a new client, Jinx, who intrigues and titillates him with a grotesque tale. Ashley can't stop thinking about Jinx and his work, making him question everything, but this interaction may lead him even further into the shadows, becoming even more loathsome. VERDICT LaRocca gives readers an unforgettable protagonist, a complicated man who will repulse them at first but will ultimately steal their hearts. Suggest to those who like the extreme horror of Paula D. Ashe or the work of Kathe Koja; it's also a good pick for those looking for intense horror, as seen in What Kind of Mother by Clay McLeod Chapman.

Library Journal

A visceral, unflinching, and yet startlingly humane plunge into desire, depravity, and the essential loneliness of existence—this is a book that you won’t, and indeed, can’t soon forget.”

author of Desert Creatures and The Bog Wife Kay Chronister

LaRocca is a singular author, and this is a strong, ambitious, intentionally disturbing book filled with lyrical prose, stories within stories, and the title phrase repeated like a mantra.”

Booklist

At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a genuinely disturbing matryoshka doll of a novel that honors the tie-binding grief and our darkest impulses. This is LaRocca’s best book yet.”

bestselling author of Horror Movie Paul Tremblay

LaRocca is a talent among horror authors with an uncompromising and no-holds-barred approach to telling horrifying stories…This is a love letter to those deep horror fans…The combination of complex characters, innovative storytelling, and viscerally upsetting narrative, this book is sure to appease those horror fans looking for something new to start 2025.”

Capes & Tights

Only Eric LaRocca can dig you a warm grave, luring you into its layered depths with a symphony of self-loathing, and make you never want to crawl out of the dark.”

author of Curse of the Reaper and Candy Cain Kills Brian McAuley

With scalpel-sharp prose and an imagination bleak as a starless night sky, Eric LaRocca is the reigning king of uncompromising, decadent horror.”

author of Lord of the Feast Tim Waggoner

With At Dark, I Become Loathsome, Eric LaRocca fully takes his place in the hallowed halls alongside predecessors like Clive Barker and David J. Schow. An utterly relentless, terrifying, and masterful work by one of the genre’s best new authors.”

author of The Rising Brian Keene

LaRocca’s most unsparing book yet. At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a rich mosaic of alienation and loss that’s as tender as it is compelling and ultimately appalling. Eric LaRocca is just so very seductive when it comes to digging graves we’ll eagerly throw ourselves into.”

author of Nestlings and Mary: An Awakening of Nat Cassidy

Terror, humor, humanity, lust, loss: at dark, everything, everything comes out. And Eric LaRocca is afraid of nothing.”

author of The Cipher and Skin Kathe Koja

Where some might be too afraid to peer into the brutality of their characters, the wreckage of their psychological wounds, Eric LaRocca is fearless and masterfully mines the darkest recesses of the human soul in search of empathy. At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a story about loneliness and belonging, ritual and friendship that proves to be LaRocca’s most personal and intimate story yet.”

author of Anybody Home? and The Body Harvest Michael J. Seidlinger

Imagine when literature had the power to be profane. Imagine reading Naked Lunch when it was first unleashed. Imagine no further. Eric LaRocca is this century’s William S. Burroughs. He is a Rimbaud abomination. His writing is akin to every Season in Hell. At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a literary ritual, an unholy evocation of those unsparing authors who martyred themselves in the name of transgressive literature. To read this book is to partake in the agony and ecstasy of our poetic saints … and to burn right alongside them at the stake.”

author of What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters Clay McLeod Chapman

Brutal, breathtaking, and beautifully written, At Dark, I Become Loathsome is Eric LaRocca at his best. It broke my heart and put it back together again, leaving jagged little scars. LaRocca is a master at peeling back the layers and showing us true darkness and depravity, the loathsome monster hiding inside us all. I applaud him for his bravery, and you, dear reader, for yours.”

New York Times bestselling author of The Winter Pe Jennifer McMahon

With LaRocca’s latest, he plunges the depths of depravity and transgressive fiction with a nightmarish tale readers will never forget.”

This Is Horror

At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a genuinely disturbing matryoshka doll of a novel that honors the tie binding grief and our darkest impulses. This is LaRocca’s best book yet.”

author of Horror Movie and The Cabin at the End of Paul Tremblay