Buried artifacts, lost treasures, ancient puzzles – archaeological digs make for terrifying fiction, especially when their excavations wreak havoc on those living in the present. It’s easy to forget that Pazuzu – the demon who caused so much havoc in ‘The Exorcist’ – emerged from an archaeological dig in Iraq.
Eric LaRocca’s debut novel, ALL THAT EATS DARKNESS (Clash, 224 pp., paperback, $16.95), opens with a similar cursed discovery. It is 1944 in Wales and a primitive drawing surrounded by ancient hieroglyphs has been found in a cave. When asked about its meaning, Heart Crowley, the treasure hunter behind the dig, replies that it is an “incantation”, then promptly proceeds to explode everyone’s head, “bright scarlet ribbons bubbling up”. Indiana Jones meets ‘Hellraiser’, anyone?
Crowley’s sinister path continues in the village of Henley’s Edge, where he involves the locals in his dark scheme: Ghost Everling, a man mourning his dead wife; Nadeem Malik, a Muslim cop whose family has been threatened; Gemma, whose daughter, Piper, is blind. LaRocca’s characters embody a broad spectrum of human desire, from the old woman who is attracted to Crowley to Everling, who is bisexual, to Malik, who is gay.
LaRocca’s writing is as opulent as a baroque painting. A strawberry rhubarb pie is “a human artery in full bloom,” and a woman captivated by Crowley feels her body “harden like cooling beeswax.” But LaRocca’s true talent lies in his ability to take his readers into the lives of his characters – a mother’s desperation to help her blind child; the mourning of a widower; a gay couple’s fight against discrimination. Such explorations allow readers to enter other lives and feel empathy for those who are like us and those who are not. That, LaRocca’s novel seems to argue, is the point of fiction – to crack open the shell of otherness and explore all that is within.
LaRocca’s talent is even more apparent in his short story collection, THE TREES GROW BECAUSE I BLED THERE (Titan, 204 pp., $19.95). The short story form, by definition an act of compression, distills LaRocca’s vision down to its essence. The stories collected here are by turns confident, brutal and breathtaking.
In “You’re Not Supposed to Be Here,” a gay couple is tricked into playing a sadistic game, one that exposes their most hidden secrets and undermines everything they love. In the brilliant ‘I’ll Be Gone by Then’, a woman must struggle to care for her elderly mother, ‘an ailment’ she ‘wouldn’t wish on anyone’, a situation that reveals the depths of fear and loathing we all feel when they face the decadent decline of the body. “She’s smaller than I remember from the last time I saw her… I can hardly remember her having such a disgusting smell – a stench as foul as rotten flowers.” And yet, by the end of the story, this daughter longs for her mother. The contradictory feelings LaRocca evokes, and the internal tensions of his characters, make “The Trees Grew Because I Bled There” a must-read horror.
Cynthia Pelayo THE Cobbler’S MAGIC (Agora, 306 pp., $27.99) is an homage to the supernatural, to horror movies and – perhaps most of all – to Chicago, a dark, cold place of “cursed and haunted things.”
“Chicago is not home to that one creepy, unkempt cemetery where people claim to see the ghosts rise,” writes Pelayo. “Chicago, the whole city, itself is the horrible and menacing thing that sprang from a swamp.”
It may come as no surprise that the crime at the novel’s center takes place in a historic theater in Chicago. And the murder, as they say in the Midwest, is a doozy. “This is deviant,” notes a detective as he surveys the scene, where a woman has been murdered with a stainless steel popcorn scoop and candy from the concession stand – Reese’s Pieces, Skittles, Twizzlers – scattered on her body. “This is disrupted.”
A vintage horror movie poster is pinned to the woman like a calling card. A clue left by the killer, it is “the star of the show, and the body on display and all that is to come is but a side character.” The novel keeps this promise. The story weaves through the perspectives of several characters – a detective on the case, his horror influencer wife, their son with an autism spectrum disorder – but ultimately focuses on “the possibility of a cursed movie, the idea that images flashing across the screen flashes can force us into some bad action.
Pelayo’s clash of magic and history is so clever and sophisticated that you’ll find yourself Googling the non-fiction that forms the basis of her story. While a few moments may seem forced – a fatal car accident comes out of nowhere, creating a tone and texture so different it feels like an afterthought – “The Shoemaker’s Magician” is a delightful foray into the occult.
Riley Sager is on top form in his latest horror thriller, THE ONLY ONE LEFT (Dutton, 382 pp., $28)a dizzying Gothic whodunit centered around the Lizzie Borden-esque massacre of the Hope family in 1929. Fifty years later, in the 1980s Walkmans and Duran Duran, Kit McDeere is hired to look after the only surviving member of the Hope clan to care.
Kit arrives at Hope’s End – a Gilded Age mansion “broad as a cruise ship” perched precariously atop a Maine bluff – to find a world frozen in time, with the carpets still stained by the blood of the murder victims. When she discovers that elderly Miss Hope is ready to reveal what really happened all those years ago, and had in fact already written a “tell all” for a previous caretaker, all the elements are in place for a propulsive mystery.
The story, which straddles Miss Hope’s typewritten first-person account and Kit’s overly talkative perspective, relies on a stilted act of deceit, camouflaged identities and (at times convenient) forgetfulness. Sager’s trademark lightning fast pace, with twists and turns that stretch credibility to the breaking point, will satisfy his many fans.
Zoje Stage’s latest novel, MOTHERED (Thomas & Mercer, 301 pp., $28.99), begins with Silas, a psychotherapist at a state hospital, reflecting on his latest patient. Grace killed her mother in an incomprehensibly cold-blooded manner, stabbing her 91 times: “The details of her case made it all the more puzzling how someone so weak could have committed an act of such brutality.”
Grace, an out-of-work hairdresser, spends her time online catfishing “young women who would take her advice,” a hobby that gives her a sense of power. When the pandemic breaks out, her mother, Jackie, moves into Grace’s house in Philadelphia, breaking her daughter’s self-imposed isolation. When Jackie puts up a picture of Hope, Grace’s deceased twin sister, it becomes clear that a past tragedy is at the heart of their bitter mother-daughter relationship.
While the setup is intriguing and the pandemic-era setting brings a wave of dizzying PTSD, Stage leaves too much unexplored. WHO is Elegance? What motivates her? When the police ask why she killed her mother, she says, “I had to kill her! She was contagious!” It is a confession that says everything and nothing at once. Grace remains inscrutable—to the psychotherapist engaged in her case, and to us.
Danielle Trussoni is the author of five books. Her new novel, ‘The Puzzle Master’, is out later this month.