Everything the darkness eats

by Eric LaRocca

published by Clash Books

202 pages

on sale: June 6, 2023

In this long novel (his first), Larocca tries to extend his writing range, and although he succeeds in the idea department, the disjointed narrative and unexplained character origins make this a tough sell.

A series of disappearances have taken place in the quiet town of Henley’s Edge, when Ghost (yes, his real name) is drawn to a secret cult led by a mysterious old man named Heart Crowley. This man has healing powers and may be behind the disappearances, but Ghost has a mystery of his own as well: he seems to have a spirit who accompanies him and pesters him all the time. The other protagonist is Malik, a policeman, and his husband who are targeted by hate groups and attack them in their home. While both of these storylines converge at the end, there is little purpose on the Malik one since most of all the important events are witnessed/acted by Ghost and Crowley. Ghost himself has a strange and rushed love-at-first-sight encounter with a woman named Gemma, who is herself drawn first by Crowley and his cult. But this sudden interest of Ghost in her feels awkward, and the fact that more people disappear without law enforcement acting more predominantly in the rest of the book is suspiciously unexplained. While the purpose of Crowley and his nature is interesting in itself, it hardly makes up for a disjointed point of view and, one could even say, gratuitous violence in the Malik storyline; there is almost no reason to mix these two stories, so it makes one think if the Ghost storyline wasn’t first concocted as a short story and then mixed with the Malik one to make it longer.

Unfortunately, this underdeveloped novel will probably not satisfy the eager readers of Larocca’s great horror short stories.