The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories by Eric LaRocca
I would like to thank Titan for an advance copy of this collection in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - Titan
Published - Out Now
Price - £13.99 hardback £9.49 Kindle eBook
Eight stories of literary dark fiction from a master storyteller. Exploring the shadow side of love, these are tales of grief, obsession, control. Intricate examinations of trauma and tragedy in raw, poetic prose. A woman imagines horrific scenarios whilst caring for her infant niece; on-line posts chronicle a cancer diagnosis; a couple in the park with their small child encounter a stranger with horrific consequences; a toxic relationship reaches a terrifying resolution…
Horror is ultimately a reaction and what makes us wince; feel that sense of fear and anxiety will vary with each person. Horror can be loud and bloody; it can be shadowy and there are places in between. In Eric LaRocca’s unsettling short fiction collection The Trees Grew Because I Bled There we get haunting and vivid tales that feel like we are being whispered to someone’s darkest thoughts and days and we can’t switch off the images these words will conjure. A very powerful and disquieting set of visceral psychological horror tales await you to impress and also make you worry about the fate of the characters and those around them.
Amongst the stories in this collection I enjoyed were: -
The opening tale You Follow Wherever They Go is a strong and weirdly unrepresentative start to the collection as a father and child debate the kid joining a group outside. This almost normal scene though feels wrong with a strange atmosphere and then we realise the father is being treated for cancer. I was very impressed by what was unsaid and the ending has annuity as to what the true state of affairs really was.
A truly dark confessional is Bodies Are For Burning - our narrator shocks us with their visceral thoughts of burning their psychiatrist alive. This tale is about mental health and suicidal thoughts placing us into how someone suffering this will feel. LaRocca then adds a child to the tale and we bounce between fear for both parties; revulsion at their thoughts; horror at their intentions and subtly understanding at least why this maybe happening. Powerful storytelling.
Similarity we get a message board posting framework for the story The Strange Thing We Become. A woman talks about her girlfriend and then tells us she is differing from cancer. These small anecdotes make us alongside our narrator watch someone’s decline and the way you can start to resent someone you love. It’s visceral and in the final scenes incredibly full of despair which again leaves a memorable impression of loneliness and grief.
The horror of You’re Not Supposed to Be Here mixes the idea of a horror set up like saw and the dark secrets about ourselves we don’t need to share with anyone. Our narrator and his husband are approached by a couple in the park thinking they are someone else. The couple loves our narrators six month old baby. Then things get dark fast. It’s about what lengths you go to protect the ones we love but dialled to the max and filled with body torture and a horrible sense more people are to be trapped in this web of pain.
This is a collection that casts an eye on the thoughts most of us never get to hear it ever want to share. LaRocca gets to peel these barriers down often bloodily and make us feel and undertand the character’s point of view. We don’t always take their side but just possibly we can say ok I get why you’ve done that. It is often on dark subjects plus filled with body horror so I do warn readers to be prepared to go to very old dark places. But if that is something you enjoy in your horror then prepare for a ride into the dark. I am very interested in how this author develops over the coming years to come and a name to watch!
