Epeolatry Book Review: This Skin Was Once Mine By Eric LaRocca
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Title: This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances
Author: Eric LaRocca
Genre: Horror
Publisher: Titan Books
Publication date: A brand-new collection of four intense, claustrophobic and terrifying horror tales from the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated and Splatterpunk Award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.
THIS SKIN WAS ONCE MINE
When her father dies under mysterious circumstances, Jillian Finch finds herself grieving the man she idolized while struggling to feel comfortable in the childhood home she was sent away from nearly twenty years ago. Then Jillian discovers a dark secret that will threaten to undo everything she has ever known about her father.
SEEDLING
A young man’s father calls him early in the morning to say that his mother has passed away. He arrives home to find his mother’s body still in the house. Struggling to process what has happened he notices a small black wound appear on his wrist. Then he discovers his father is cursed with the same affliction.
ALL THE PARTS OF YOU THAT WON’T EASILY BURN
Enoch Leadbetter goes to buy a knife for his husband to use at a forthcoming dinner party. He encounters a strange shopkeeper who draws him into an intoxicating new obsession and sets him on a path towards mutilation and destruction…
PRICKLE
Two old men revive a cruel game with devastating consequences…
Eric LaRocca has attracted quite a bit of debate, and even controversy, since he emerged on the horror scene at the start of this decade and just kept on going. His short novella “Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke” has spawned all kinds of threads on Reddit and heated discussions online and offline. Even his titles ooze horror. Fittingly, this latest collection of four of his stories comes with one of the most trenchant trigger warnings I’ve encountered. “I heartily suggest you sincerely consider whether or not you’d like to subject yourself to such upsetting material,” LaRocca counsels in his brief introduction to the book. It’s more or less the last place in the volume where he goes easy on the reader, although it should be emphasised that there is nothing gratuitous or prurient here. Sufferers or survivors of certain conditions and experiences may find such fiction cathartic; they may also find it traumatic. LaRocca explores “the ways in which we inherently harm one another and the obsessions we nurture to prevent further suffering” with great sympathy and insight, while not flinching for one instant from examining those wounds and pathologies in grimly forensic detail.
“This Skin Was Once Mine” explores the damaged childhood and wounded maturity of Jillian Finch, only child of a rich family who turned her out at age nine, for unpleasant reasons obliquely hinted at. On the death of her revered father, she’s called back to the family she hasn’t seen her entire adult life. Body horror features frequently, through the lead protagonist’s self-injury and cutting habits, and her mother’s awful machine-sustained half-life. At times the atmosphere’s almost Hitchcockesque – although with an explicitness that Hitchcock must have dreamed of. The outcome, as you might expect, is as deranged and bloodstained as the key characters.
“Seedling” is another story of familial bereavement, loss and misunderstanding, with another rich serving of grotesque objective correlatives. This time, while “This Skin Was Once Mine” is surreal but more or less earthbound psychological horror, LaRocca’s imagination strays into the decidedly extramundane and/or inexplicable, although far closer to the preternatural than the occult. A son visits his father after his mother’s death, and finds that the wounds of grief are more than just a metaphor. It’s a probing way to try to reach some kind of connection and communion, but no, not-in-the-way-you’re-thinking probing. It’s much worse.
In “All the Parts of You that Won’t Easily Burn,” Enoch Leadbetter has a chance meeting with “an immaculately groomed gentleman” in early middle age, whose “small cut behind his ear” is the only defect – one might say, transgression – in his otherwise flawless appearance. The gentleman in question is a vendor of fine cutlery, and the payment he asks in return for one of his keenest knives is not monetary. It might be called a Faustian bargain if the protagonist weren’t so drawn to the opportunity to “live authentically” – in return for his pound of flesh.
“Prickle” is the name of a game shared by Arthur Spirro and Emmett Chessler, two old friends meeting after many years apart – a game of random acts of minor cruelty against strangers. Needless to say, when they revive the game, it soon gets out of hand.
LaRocca’s stories are absolutely not for the squeamish. You’ll squeam, and squeam, and squeam. The Cronenberg of Dead Ringers and Crimes of the Future is one comparison that immediately springs to mind. If LaRocca ever followed Poe’s dictum and wrote a book entitled “My Heart Laid Bare,” while being true to the title, there’s a strong suspicion that the result would involve thoracotomy, rack-and-pinion rib spreaders, and open cardiac massage. But that’s just as a physical analogue to the kind of psychological and emotional pain and damage laid bare here. As one of his protagonists says, “the worst thing a person can do to you after they’ve hurt you is let you live.” I hope you all live long after reading LaRocca.
/5
- About the Author
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Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish author, poet, journalist, historian, games writer, and media professional. Born in 1961, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, has lived and worked in Asia and Central Europe, and currently lives in France.
Paul’s first collection of short stories, Black Propaganda, appeared from H. Harksen Productions in 2016. His second story collection, The Echo of The Sea & other Strange War Stories, was published by Egaeus Press in 2017. His short novel The Three Books was published by Black Shuck Books in 2018. His short story “The People of the Island,” in Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales, from H. Harksen Productions, received an Honorable Mention from Ellen Datlow in her Best Horror of the Year Volume Two list for 2009 and his story “The First Circus of the New Year” received the same in 2016. His historical novel Begin the Beguine and his semi-autobiographical novel Death of a Doppelgänger were both published in 2023. He has written several books of French wartime history. His latest horror work is his apocalyptic novel Theogasm (2024).
Paul’s acclaimed first poetry collection, The Golden Age, was published by Bellew Publishing in 1997, and reissued on Kindle in 2013. His second poetry collection, The Musical Box of Wonders, was published by H. Harksen Productions in 2011. His sonnet cycle The Great Arcana: Sonnets for the 22 Trumps of the Tarot, and his ballad cycle Black Ballads, based on traditional Scottish myths and legends, were both published in 2022.
Paul’s Lovecraftian and dark fiction, and criticism, has appeared in numerous formats and journals worldwide, including Occult Detective Magazine, Weirdbook, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, the Financial Times, the UK Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, Arts of Asia, Strange Horizons, A Broad Scot, and elsewhere. His co-translations from the Japanese, done with Maki Sugiyama, include The Poems of Nakahara Chuya (1993) and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1995) by the 1994 Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe, which won a Japan Festival Award. He also co-translated Superstrings (2007) by Dinu Flamand from Romanian with Olga Dunca. Paul is a former Executive Committee member of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors of Great Britain. He was rated #1 of “The 12 Publishing Shakers You Should Be Following” by The Independent Publishing Magazine. He is also the official clan poet of Clan Mackintosh.
