
Title: Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
Author: Eric LaRocca
Genre: Horror Novella
Number of Pages: 102
Rating: B+
Recommended?: Yes

Bitches be crazy! I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book but I ended up liking it a lot. It starts on a really weird note with a young woman named Agnes on a GLBTQA+ forum trying to sell an antique apple peeler that belonged to her great grandmother. A woman named Zoe responds and ends up giving Agnes enough money to pay her rent and allowing her to keep the precious family heirloom.
Agnes and Zoe start chatting all the time and Zoe slowly starts to make Agnes do things that she’s not comfortable with, ending in a epic psychological meltdown filled with depravity and manipulation. The great thing about Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke are the little details, which make it feel more plausible as well as inventively disturbing. The story is a very small-scale portrait of isolation and insanity but the author breathes a surprising amount of life into the characters’ lonely, delusional worlds.
The storyline is really bizarre and unnerving and I don’t want to give away too much, but I’m a horror fan who likes really dark stuff and I can say it creeped me out. The only issue I had with this book was the ending, which was slightly disappointing. Overall I was impressed by Eric LaRocca’s twisted imagination and his ability to create a story with homosexual leads where homosexuality was just a part of their characters and wasn’t the focus.
Yessss, when you said Larocca breathed a surprising amount of life into the characters, I totally agree 💯 I love finding authors who can write a punch of a novella!
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