Title: We Can Never Leave This PlaceAuthor: Eric LaRocca
First Published: June 24, 2022
Publisher: Trepidatio Publishing
Pages: 106
Genre: Dark Fantasy, Fantasy, Horror, Magical Realism, Transgressive Fiction
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
Rating:
Synopsis:
"When you're given a gift, something else gets taken away."
A precocious young girl with an unusual imagination is sent on an odyssey into the depths of depravity. After her father dies violently, young Mara is surprised to find her mother welcoming a new guest into their home, claiming that he will protect them from the world of devastation and destruction outside their door.
A grotesque and thrilling dark fantasy, We Can Never Leave This Place is a harrowing portrait of inherited grief and familial trauma.
Buy the Book: AmazonReview
We Can Never Leave This Place is a phantasmagorical masterpiece, a surreal nightmare about an imaginative girl trapped in lockdown at home with her mother. The world is in chaos and there is some world-ending disaster going on, but home isn’t any safer. This story felt like a classic dark fairy tale, and it’s a story that is best experienced blind.
It is one of the few books that has really, truly disturbed me. Reading the line, “I gave myself to him” honestly made me throw the book down in skin-crawling disgust, but then I picked the book right back up again to keep reading. At its core, this story is about familial abuse and the way that trauma is passed down from generation to generation. This book hurt me and I was an emotional wreck reading the last chapter, but I loved the book for this very reason. This story has so much filth and abject horror softened only slightly by the seemingly magical elements in the book, at least until it becomes clear what is really happening.
This book really sealed it for me that Eric LaRocca truly is one of the absolute best authors currently writing horror fiction. LaRocca is a wordsmith whose stories are creative and brutal, and it is clear that they have a profound understanding of human suffering.
Quote
“I wanted to be the only one to hurt you.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Eric LaRocca
Eric LaRocca holds an MFA in Writing for Film and Television from Emerson College. His fiction has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies published in the US and abroad such as Stiff Things and Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Volume 2. He is also the author of several plays that have been developed and produced at theaters across the country including, Gadfly Theater Productions, Hartford Stage, La Petite Morgue, and Love Creek Productions. He currently resides in Cambridge, MA.
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