Have You Read This? You've Lost a Lot of Blood by Eric LaRocca

 From horror classics like Frankenstein and Dracula to Joe Hill’s “Twittering (or is it Tweeting) at the Circus of the Dead,” the epistolary technique has been used in horror to generate terror. It is both a peak over the shoulder of the main character as they write, record, or blast out on the Internet their innermost thoughts while also forcing the reader to piece together all the notes, letters, entries, etc. to figure out what exactly is going on. Once the final note, journal entry, etc. is read and the last puzzle piece snaps into place, then the reader can be rightly horrified by the entire picture. For example, Eric LaRocca’s latest work, You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood, can be a story within a story, but it is also much more ambitious than that description.

The novel is basically a critique of the work of Martyr Black, a writer who has a penchant for describing murders he may or may not have committed in enough graphic detail that lends people to believe he knows murder intimately. While there are many diary entries, transcripts of recordings, and even attempts at poetry by Martyr Black, there is the novel he’s written, also titled, “You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood,” that runs through the entire work like an infected thread in a sutured wound. The story in that book is about a programmer who, while caring for her younger brother, takes a job that requires her to complete a game that just might be cursed.

What brims in Black’s story is a story that’s plenty scary and gruesome on its own, with loads of body horror and family trauma. But LaRocca’s work also looks at some very metafictive questions, such as what does an artist’s work, whether intentional or not, reveal about that artist. There are moments in the book that seem to be real snippets of Black’s life, but the novel and poetry within may be just as revealing. It’s a book that somehow manages to be both a tale about the loss of identity and a character study that tries to paint a very bloody picture of who Black is. If readers like a puzzle and don’t mind (losing) a lot of blood, then they should attempt to know Martyr Black.