Everything the Darkness Eats, the new novel from Eric LaRocca, is a brilliant, complex snarl of a book. Taking elements of the New England gothic style of horror, LaRocca’s own talent for blending disturbing scenes with startling emotional and physical vulnerability, and a sense of constantly escalating impending doom, it draws the reader through a devastating exploration of grief and the awful lengths it can drive someone to. But while there’s plenty of disturbing moments and devastation to be found, LaRocca’s emphasis on complex characterization and his focus on the lives and intersecting fates of his cast, as well as a refusal to give them any easy answers or neatly tied-up endings to their various stories that turns the book from something familiar into something newer and far more devastating than the average gothic horror yarn.
In Henley’s Edge, Connecticut, people are disappearing. Led to their unusual fate by Heart Crowley, a man of eccentric manner and supernatural influence, they find themselves drawn to his large mansion and the terrifying power he keeps contained in his basement. But no one merely disappears, and Crowley’s abductions cause ripples through Henley’s Edge that affect everyone– Malik, a police officer tasked with investigating the disappearances even as he and his husband Brett deal with politely sinister homophobia from their neighbors and terrifying hate crimes; Ghost, a man with a parasitic sprite that feeds on his negative emotions; and Gemma, a young woman simply trying to go through life while providing for her blind daughter Piper. All will cross paths with each other, and all will be drawn towards Crowley and his mansion’s bizarre occupant. The question is what will be left of them afterward.
What LaRocca excels at in Everything the Darkness Eats is building a sense of impending doom. Heart Crowley’s pattern is established early, with the old man strolling into a church thrift store and walking out with his first victim, the narration entirely from her point of view as she feels more and more of her every thought being wiped away by whatever force Crowley commands. It’s a powerful scene, with Ms. Childers never realizing fully what’s happening before it’s too late and the reader helpless to watch her. Even though you spend maybe a chapter watching Ms. Childers get swallowed up, you still feel for her, something that only intensifies as Crowley targets characters who’ve been around longer in the narrative. The supernatural sense of doom is even paralleled with a more mundane sense as Malik and his husband deal with the series of mounting homophobic attacks, with neighbors and even the police chief pushing them to either stop being themselves in public or leave the town entirely, the escalation mirroring Crowley’s increasingly forceful use of his otherworldly powers. Even when the threat isn’t supernatural, there’s a sense of helplessness that’s utterly unnerving. It’s a perfect balance, allowing you to anticipate the horrors to come while still keeping the outcome uncertain enough that the reader hopes that maybe this time someone will actually win out.
That expert balance of the mundane and supernatural elements helps underscore the sinister air LaRocca imbues in Henley’s Edge. As Crowley goes about his dark mission to collect townspeople, Malik and Brett deal with the casual homophobia from their neighbors and even the chief of police, and a series of escalating attacks that end with a brutal hate crime and Brett in the hospital. Ghost spends his hospital visit arguing with the parasitic spirit curled around his neck, but the main focus of the scene is his interactions with Gemma and her daughter Piper, and the hopelessness they all feel at their respective circumstances. Things don’t just ramp up in one sense or the other, but mirror– Ghost even (unknowingly) passes by a kidnapped Malik while enacting a kidnapping of his own to try and save Crowley’s victims before the start of his ritual, for example, each protagonist growing more and more desperate in their attempts to escape the circumstances they find themselves in, the onrush of their impending fates only increasing the tension.
That sense of impending doom and the balance of mundane and supernatural horror wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the fact that LaRocca makes sure that you care about and feel for all of these characters. Horror cannot exist without some degree of empathy and sympathy– you have to care about the awful things happening to people for those awful things to have impact– and it’s especially important given the themes of Everything the Darkness Eats. There are no nameless victims or senseless sacrifices in Darkness. Most of these people have lives, homes, people who care about them. It makes the horror more intimate, more personal to see Brett and Malik’s life, to see them arguing over trying to make a home for themselves even as their lives get torn apart. To see Malik investigating the disappearances of Crowley’s victims and meeting their families, both tying him into the community and showing the absences left by the horrifying events in the plot. Even the monsters of the book are touched by past trauma, grief, and loss in their own way, those touches driving them to sickening and reprehensible actions. Grief and loss cause ripples, impact waves that spread out further than the people at their epicenter, and with his solid characterization, LaRocca makes sure every impact counts.
It’s important to note, though, that as guarded as Everything the Darkness Eats is, there’s at least some note of optimism in the work. Sure, the grief and trauma the characters experience lead them to do reckless and monstrous things, but there’s always that note of hope, that maybe the more sympathetic members of the cast will actually make it through their experiences– not intact, Darkness thankfully never feels like the kind of book where someone will escape unscathed– but in enough of one piece that with time and effort, they’ll eventually be able to move on from the horrible things they’ve witnessed. It would be easy for LaRocca to be cynical or pessimistic in a book like this, one that draws on both the very real horror of hatred and the more cosmic and gothic horror of the thing Heart Crowley keeps in his basement, but that note of hopefulness, the idea that things might get better, the idea that letting yourself feel and processing the complex emotions that come with awful life events is the right thing to do, feels more genuine overall than the darkness and pessimism would be here.
In the end, it’s how genuine all of it feels that makes Everything the Darkness Eats so effective. Eric LaRocca’s always been great at exploring the toxic and sometimes destructive ways we process complex emotions, and using that gift to explore grief and loss in the framework of a New England gothic (a subgenre that’s a fertile ground to explore those feelings) makes the book hit all that much harder. It’s a complex snarl of a work that manages both deeply disturbing horror and explosive catharsis, but avoids tying any of it up neatly or simply, allowing its damaged characters to exist without needing to be crushed or “saved.” Everything the Darkness Eats is a brilliantly sharp, nasty, and foreboding work of horror, one that understands the genre and emotions it builds on while pushing their boundaries to newer territory.
