Publisher – UK - Titan  -US – Clash Books

Published – Out Now

Price – UK £13.99 hardback Kindle £6.99    US paperback £16.95 Kindle $10.00

An insidious darkness threatens to devastate a rural New England village when occult forces are conjured and when bigotry is left unrestrained.

After a recent string of disappearances in a small Connecticut town, a grieving widower with a grim secret is drawn into a dangerous ritual of dark magic by a powerful and mysterious older gentleman named Heart Crowley. Meanwhile, a member of local law enforcement tasked with uncovering the culprit responsible for the bizarre disappearances soon begins to learn of a current of unbridled hatred simmering beneath the guise of the town’s idyllic community―a hatred that will eventually burst and forever change the lives of those who once found peace in the quiet town of Henley’s Edge.

Horror as I’ve mentioned before is a genre seeking our emotional response to the tale being told. Horror is often thought as filled with monsters and all sorts of supernatural creatures. In some ways these can be comforting. The other disquieting type of horror can be what human beings are capable of. In some ways more terrifying as we will cross paths with other people as our lives continue. In Eric La Rocca’s disturbing and ambitious novella Everything The Darkness Eats we have a dual narrative trying to blend the two together and while I found this a tale hard to put down there are aspects I am not too sure quite gel together.

Ghost is a man in pain. A terrible accident three years has hurt his body and the aftermath left many mental scars too. He lives apart; hiding from debtors and tormented by a strange spirit only he sees. Each day is a struggle. Elsewhere in the small town of Henley’s Edge is being rocked a by number of strange disappearances and a mysterious seller of burial plots named Heart Crowley is wandering looking for new customers.

Elsewhere in the town Sergeant Nadeem Malik is concerned that his neighbourhood is not welcoming of their first married gay couple in the area. There is a growing escalation of abusive messages to him and his husband Brett that hints further danger is arising but even his employer thinks its his gestures of affection in public that are at fault. Much greater danger connects these characters and Ghost, Crowley and Malik will cross paths in unexpected ways.

Noe this is a novella with two sides of horror being linked by the idea that terrible things can just happen to people out of the blue through no real fault of their own. We have those who tread into Crowley’s supernatural games and malik falling victim to a neighbourhood’s dangerous homophobia. Both sides of the horror that I referred to and individually each strand is told very well and kept me involved but the ultimate fusion of the two tales unusually I think lessened their impact. This felt overall one time I needed a little more from both plots to really make the story work and for a change the novella form seemed not to aid the story.

La Rocca is a captivating writer capable of exploring the darker side of life and making us feel exposed in ways few horror writers can manage. In Ghost’s part of the story everything is strange and there is a feeling of suspense. Crowley is a classic adversary knows a lot of the supernatural and as we see with some of his earliest victims, he knows how to press a person’s buttons to get what he wants. Temptation is his game, and the question is how Ghost will be involved in things. This plotline impressively surprised me where it went and links the two plotlines. It’s a smart idea but does create a perhaps convenient way of wrapping things up very quickly. A satisfying supernatural adventure.

Malik’s side of the tale is the more complex. We feel his horror at finding his ideal home slowly plagued by acts of homophobia and this escalates and escalates. He is being penalised purely for being gay and even his boss thinks he is at fault – one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the story and highlighting the power of intolerance. We watch him lose control and things then go into a very dark place. We have very dark scenes of violence and rape that I think readers need to be aware of. We watch Malik being almost broken and seeing his eventual torturer almost as someone he must obey. These are dramatic and powerful scenes that very much sucked me into the tale but ultimately especially in how the tale ends I’m not sure they needed to be in the tale. Malik is ultimately just a convenient interruption to Crowley’s world that allows the finale to progress and for me the more I felt after reading my impression was that I’d read two very good horror tales but they actually when blended together lessened each other’s impact. Indeed, the rape scenes feel more there for taking the reader to a dark place more than enlighten the story. A bit more to malik’s life and perhaps a bit more for malik to do in the finale may have justified this character’s horrible nightmare journey into intolerance. The overall effect I think is lessened too much to make it fully work in a shorter fiction form and a bit more time developing this plotline before and after the graphic scenes may have worked better.

Is this a good horror story- definitely. It creates that feeling of dread and the story has plenty of surprises and neat character work but I think it slightly misses its target to wrap everything up effectively and make its points. Le Rocca is still though an author I’m intrigued by what they will do next. Worth a look.