In two-time Bram Stoker Award finalist Eric LaRocca’s new novel, we meet a man who tries to offer strangers a peace that he himself has never managed to reach.
Ashley has suffered two tragedies that have left him entirely untethered, bereft and deeply depressed. His beloved wife recently died of cancer, and soon after she did, his son is abducted (lost? ran away?) from a busy street in their small town. Ashley carries immense guilt at having treated his son cruelly about the child’s potential homosexuality, something he knows came from his own childhood trauma. Now, he refers to himself as a “self loathing bisexual,” and has sunk so far into his grief and guilt that he has covered his face with piercings and metal augmentations in an attempt to look as “monstrous” as he feels; he has also set up an elaborate death ritual for strangers who find him online when they are suicidal.
This death ritual comprises of Ashley burying his clients in a coffin underground for thirty minutes, and then digging them back up, at which point they feel reborn, with a new appreciation for life. We meet Ashley as he is about to conduct one of these burials. We suspend our disbelief that an average man could do all the digging, burying, digging up again quite so easily, alone and in a timely manner; we try to understand what may have driven him to this odd career. Ashley has reached a point where he is starting to feel that actual death may be a kindness for some of his clients, but before that can be explored deeply, and before we really have the time to consider the logistics involved, Ashley is contacted by a man who asks for the ritual to take place right away, a man whom Ashley feels compelled to meet because “there’s something dangerous about him. It’s almost as if he possesses a dark secret that only I can drag out of him.” Ashley is also immediately attracted to this man, though he can not understand why he suddenly feels desire in a way he has not felt in years. Meeting this man and learning what he knows changes the course of Ashley’s life forever.
Right off the bat: This is not a book for anyone easily triggered—or triggered at all. If you know LaRocca’s work (or even of it), if you know you’re picking up a splatterpunk horror novel, you should know better than to be bothered by what is to come. For those who need trigger warnings, feel free to slap on any and all that you can think of on this book: suicidal ideations, rape, abuse, murder, homophobia. This book is relentless in its pursuit to horrify.
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At Dark, I Become Loathsome
At Dark, I Become Loathsome
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Does that make it true horror? Possibly not, because while it may be truly repulsive, it isn’t genuinely frightening. Within the main narrative of Ashley’s rituals and his search to find some grace (and that’s a generous take on the basic plot), there are included two stories that don’t have anything to do with the main narrative; they appear to exist just to provide a sort of shock detour. One is a tale of torture told by the mysterious stranger to Ashley over online chat, the other a story Ashley has read online, about a man fetishising his lover’s cancer. Both stories are disturbing, of course, with the second being very reminiscent of the stories of writer Billy Martin (who is quoted as Poppy Z. Brite in the novel’s epigraph) but both fail to connect in any way to the main narrative, or even provide a relief from the already stuttering pace where the only constant is despair. At a stretch, perhaps the second story is soaked in a similar sort of shame and guilt that Ashley feels, and bears the self revulsion that At Dark, I Become Loathsome drips with.
Ashley reminds us very often how much he hates himself. The titular phrase is repeated many, many times—for rhythm, for impact, or perhaps for neither of the two, because it does not provide either after a few repetitions; in fact, it loses impact almost entirely. What’s interesting is that, although Ashley keeps saying he becomes loathsome when it’s dark, he isn’t actually any different during the day; he’s still miserable, he’s still full of self-loathing and he’s still thinking about or planning the same things he will do after dark. We aren’t really told how he came up with this ritual, what drove him to this specifically, or what it does for him. The assumption, of course, is that he gains some sort of release by watching others take on a new lease on life, but this theory falls short once Ashley decides he needs to let people die (not a spoiler—it happens quite early on in the novel). Are we to understand that he’s so messed up he can no longer think straight? That he truly believes this is a logical act, that he is doing people a favour? Or is he really becoming a monster? Ashley does display his vulnerability with openness, even if he is a bit overwrought, explaining that “…happiness makes me sad. For I will always be sad. I will always be the miserable and wretched thing people are frightened of. I’m a monster after all.”
There are some inconsistencies in the plot, some repeated ideas and images (not in a way that show a motif developing, or foreshadow a plot point) that make the already purple prose grate a little bit too much, when missing little details become irritants. Much suspension of disbelief is needed here, even just to believe that Ashley can get away with doing what he does, given how little precaution he takes. The graphic nature of the body gore and the various depravities the novel features give us a sense of just how awful humanity can be, just how wretched these characters are, but there is little of substance behind the splatterpunk grotesqueries.
Ultimately though. At Dark, I Become Loathsome is about shame, guilt and about how people pass on cruelties in an endless vicious cycle, even to those they cherish the most. It is about our own unresolved traumas, sometimes stemming from the denial of who we are, how easily we burden our children with these horrors, and how difficult it is to live with the consequences.
At Dark, I Become Loathsome is published by Blackstone.
