With darkly poetic prose and chilling stories that peel back layers of skin to reveal a beating, bloody heart, Eric LaRocca is the clear literary heir of Clive Barker. You will have to sit through the main character painstakingly solving each word in one of those picture word puzzles despite the fact that by the second word, it is obvious that the result is the title of the story.

My main warning is that once you start reading you won't be able to stop, so make sure you've got the time on the day you open this up!Also, as an extremely negative reviewer on this page pointed out, what she wants out of Agnes is, to start with, quite literally just 24/7 BDSM. I also felt there was no decline which was intended to be the main part of horror aside from shock value. The image is often paired with an equally haunting line: “What have you done today to deserve your eyes? I hated that it's made out the bdsm is just being selfish and personally pushing someone to do something they clearly don't want to do for the fun of it. The form is familiar, but its narrative is ground-breaking in its exploration of the darker side of online queer ‘safe’ spaces.

I thoroughly hated Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and yet, it only went downhill from there. Reading this novella is an agreement to embark on a voyeuristic character study between two women who meet through an online message board.I found myself in mind of Kathe Koja’s THE CIPHER, due to the body horror and exploration of all it means to be, and to be a woman. As soon as it's mentioned that this kid is building a cruifex you know he's going to nail himself to it. He points to the “incredible and haunting” cover, which he thinks drew lots of readers in, especially on platforms as visual as TikTok or Instagram. But I’m still so used to queerness being a direct source of horror to the mainstream that the kind of queer horror I’m most comfortable with is as a reader involves queer characters but isn’t directly queer focused in its themes.