Eric LaRocca is an author that diehard horror fans have recently discovered. He has written such unnerving works as Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood. LaRocca has recently spread his light-absorbing wings, creating his first novel length work called Everything the Darkness Eats, a work that threatens to put all of us under its oppressive shadow.
That shadow rises from the depths of Henley’s Edge, a small Connecticut town, with anger and bigotry boiling beneath its veneer of Americana. This is where eccentric older gentleman Heart Crowley drives around in his Rolls Royce looking for victims to help with his occult rituals. Another local from Henley’s Edge is Ghost, a young man reeling from personal loss and a little spirit that feeds off his misery. The two men meet just as police officer Malik tries to solve the town’s rash of disappearances and Crowley’s dark deeds start to come to fruition. Malik might be in over his head because what Crowley has in his basement could destroy Henley’s Edge and the universe that exists beyond it.
Those who’ve seen John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness might find a lot of things similar in Henley’s Edge, particularly the cosmic horror brewing underneath. Ghost and Heart are delightfully and expectedly weird, but the real terrors come with officer Malik and his husband bearing the brunt of the town’s simmering prejudice, first as scare tactics and then slowly but surely upping the brutality, culminating in an assault that will leave readers gasping. LaRocca’s story is a blend of otherworldly horrors and all-too-familiar ones, particularly if one watches current events. Overall, this story feels like a collaboration between Stephen King and Clive Barker if they were 30 years younger, but it still has all the bloody flourishes that marks it as straight from the brain of Eric LaRocca.
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