Book Review : Eric LaRocca - This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances (2024)
You can tell a lot about someone by the way they react to horror stories. Fear is such a visceral emotion, you can get an idea for what a person has gone through from what makes them afraid. Monsters and jump scares don't do much for me, but the discreet wounds and the quiet otherworldliness of Eric LaRocca's short stories sure do. His brand new collection This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances is him doing what he does best: exploring the fearsome beauty of his characters' wounds and weaknesses.
This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances is a collection of four short stories, including the titular hundred pages-long novella, written as a non-linear narrative, where a young adult woman is trying to come terms with her mental health issues while dealing with the upcoming death of her estranged mother. Sometimes intimate and visceral, sometimes symbolic and spectacular, This Skin Was Once Mine is one of the most heartbreaking things I've read in a couple of years. It's throbbing with life and pain.
The best horror stories (or just the best stories) are always the ones where the enemy is a protagonist's weakness or flaw and Eric LaRocca is well aware of this. He understands the dynamics of self-destructiveness better than most authors I’ve read in recent year and never fails to approach if from such a humane point of view. Jillian, the protagonist of This Skin Was Once Mine is trying to mend her fractured psyche and what happens to her is propely framed as a tragedy. She causes her own loss, but she ain't the bad guy.
That's why I loved it even if it got WAY under my skin.
Seedling was perhaps my least favorite story in the collection and, by any means, I thought it was very good. It's another story about a dying mom, where a son and his father are physically affected by a wound that seems like a physical manifestation of grief. It's a quite visual story with a haunting symbolic ending, but I thought it was a little too on the nose compared to the others? It's still one of the efficient stories I've read in illustrating the overbearing power of grief, but it felt like it could be even more than it is.
All The Parts Of You That Won't Easily Burn would have been my favorite story of the year if it wasn't This Skin Once Was Mine. Holy shit that story is so much fun and off-putting at the same time. Obviously inspired by the fiction of Clive Barker, it features a man named Enoch) who accidentally discovers a weird, unlikely life-affirming kink while trying to purchase a present for his husband (aptly named Clive). It explores the idea of self-discovery and self-definition from an angle I never even considered yet.
In All The Parts Of You That Won't Easily Burn, Enoch inadvertently becomes a member of secret (or discreet) group that inserts pieces of glass in small wounds they cut all over their body and revel in the dopamine it provides. Once again, the generational talent Eric LaRocca has for symbolism is put to good use here as he explored the idea of nursing your wounds and even creating yourself more wounds because the pain makes you feel alive. It's both riveting and disturbing because it is so relatable.
The closer Prickle tells the story of two old men who unearth a buried pleasure for tormenting strangers. It features the two most unlikable protagonists of the collection (Enoch might rub some people the wrong way, but I really liked him), but LaRocca's patient and tactful approach to storytelling applies a relatable context to such a monstrous undertaking that he makes it feel like extreme sports: it surfs the line until it goes wrong. You wouldn't do what the protagonists do, but you get why they do it.
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I live to read things like This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances. It's such a vibrant swan dive into the human spirit in all its wonders and flaws. It has become cliché for reviewers to claim that real horror is rooted in the human heart, but Eric LaRocca provides a personal spin on it. His protagonists are never rotten (at least not fully). They are wounded and compromised, but something about their ordeal is greater than they are. They've just been swept by their own passions. LaRocca is a talent. The hype is real.
