Coping Mechanism in the Grave: At Dark, I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca

 TW: Child Abduction, Child Death, fetishizing severe illness, struggles with sexuality, exploitation

According to this government website, in 2022 there were approximately 260,000 reported child abductions in the United States. That, obviously, doesn’t account for those unreported abductions or those children who are simply considered runaways. At the end of 2022, approximately 30,000 of those reported child abductions were still considered active cases. 

Looking at that number, it is difficult to imagine the grief and heartache of the families of those missing children, especially those left without an answer. In this relatively small population, I was unable to find a source for single parent families, but I imagine that there are at least a few. 

What would a single parent’s grieving process look like? What would happen if they had lost their spouse/other parent to cancer or something worse? 

Grief grabs you, holds you, and forces you to witness the absence.

Eric LaRocca’s newest novel At Dark, I Become Loathsome explores the grieving process of Ashley Lutin, who is driven to getting many piercings and who begins to provide a sort of immersion therapy for others involving burying them alive for a short period of time. 

This novel is just as horrible as it is horror. Ashley is not a good man and while he pretends to some decency during the day, he recognizes that when night falls, he becomes something awful to himself. This isn’t just about his grieving the loss of his wife and son, as he is also struggling with his shifting sexuality. 

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, because the narrative builds Ashley from a somewhat sympathetic character to someone to be absolutely loathed. The more interesting part to me was how I resisted disliking this character because of his troubles. I didn’t want to hate him, but by the end of the book, I was disgusted by him and his selfish behavior. I hated his “immersion therapy”, hated most of the people who were called to contact him. His clientele reminded me of the people trying ayahuasca or mushrooms to try to force a spiritual experience, appropriating the cultures of others in the search for enlightenment (or more likely, a new high and a new bragging experience). 

LaRocca has become one of my favorite authors for his willingness to push the boundaries of horror, to show us queer experiences where the horror isn’t the queerness, but the people experiencing life. This short novel leaned more into the kind of horror that Chuck Palahnuik gave us in novels like Haunted  and Invisible Monsters. The horror is really that this kind of experience is absolutely plausible, that people can really be this horrible and still manage to cover it up for the most part. At least Ashley attempts to make his outside look as loathsome and strange as his inside.

Beyond that, this novel explores what happens when grief and guilt consume someone’s life and how some coping mechanisms should never be. 

Remember, when your last bit of air has escaped you and the light begins to die, I shall be here with another recommendation should you need it.