“If you’re reading this, you’ve likely thought that the world would be a better place without you.”
With this single line of text, shining in the darkness of the internet, Ashley Lutin offers transformation for those who despair in the night. For Ashley has thought the same, and worse, since his wife died and his young son disappeared. Ashley performs a particular ritual designed to help those who desire to die yet yearn to continuing living a better life.
Fighting his own endless grief, Ashley connects with Jinx—a potential candidate for his ritual. Jinx spins a strange and revolting tale, and Ashley becomes obsessed. Trapped in this dangerous relationship, a spiral of painful revelations and long held secrets are dragged into the light, kicking and screaming.
Why we’re excited about this book:
Eric LaRocca has quickly become one of the most compelling horror writers in modern times. The author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, We Can Never Leave This Place, Everything the Darkness Eats, You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood, They Were Here Before Us, and the collections The Trees Grew Because I Bled There and This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances, LaRocca’s short fiction has been featured in such publications as Bound in Blood and Stiff Things: The Splatterporn Anthology. With LaRocca’s latest, he plunges the depths of depravity and transgressive fiction with a nightmarish tale readers will never forget. Clay McLeod Chapman (Kill Your Darling, What Kind of Mother) says: “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.”, and Kathe Koja (The Cipher, Skin) says At Dark, I Become Loathsome is “Terror, humor, humanity, lust, loss: at dark, everything, everything comes out. And Eric LaRocca is afraid of nothing.”
Releasing from Blackstone Publishing, Inc 28 January 2025, At Dark, I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA