Eric LaRocca is ready to cross the threshold.
In the four years since his breakthrough novella, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, went viral as one of 2021's must-read horror stories, LaRocca's done a lot. He's published more novellas and short fiction, released collections centered around some of his most acclaimed stories, and ventured into novels with Everything the Darkness Eats and At Dark, I Become Loathsome. He's an author known for evocative prose, pitch-black subject matter, and consistently working in the subgenre he has termed “queer transgressive horror.”
He's also known for writing short works. Even his novels tend to run at low word counts, making LaRocca an author whose stories you can devour in single sittings.
“My immediate reaction to anything, any sort of creative project, is how can I tell this piece as efficiently and succinctly as possible? My mind immediately goes to novella-length work because that's just how my brain is wired,” LaRocca told me over Zoom from his home in Massachusetts.
But that changed with Burnt Sparrow, the new horror trilogy LaRocca kicks off this fall with We Are Always Tender With Our Dead, a dark descent into a very strange town and the often brutal, isolated human souls it contains. However frequently his mind turns to shorter work, LaRocca said this story quickly revealed itself as a first for the author: A horror epic.
“I started to realize I can't just tell this story in one single book,” LaRocca said. “The characters that I want to explore, the dynamics that I want to analyze, and the things I want to talk about, I can't really condense. To condense it would be a severe detriment to my art.”
We Are Always Tender with Our Dead (launching September 9 from Titan Books) takes readers to LaRocca's version of Twin Peaks, Peyton Place or Castle Rock, a small town rife with secrets and its own peculiar way of doing things. Nestled into an isolated part of New Hampshire, Burnt Sparrow is a place where town elders govern their residents' every step at the behest of a mysterious, unseen “committee.” It's a place that takes its name from a vision of a mythic, ashen bird, a place where faceless children are pulled from factories, a place with a long history of tragedy.
As we enter Burnt Sparrow, we meet a young man named Rupert, struggling with his own queer identity in the wake of his mother's death, and struggling even more in his relationship with his own distant father. That all changes when a mass shooting on Christmas Day traumatizes the town and puts Rupert and his father alarmingly close to the carnage and the town's response to it.
“That's where the story began for me, in that I wanted Rupert to be this focal point of the depravity and the decay already at play in Burnt Sparrow, and magnify that to a thousand,” LaRocca said. “Setting Rupert's journey against this really debauched backdrop of Burnt Sparrow, I thought that that was a really interesting juxtaposition and shows you how the town and the place in and of itself is just rotted from the inside out, no matter what.”
That rot within Burnt Sparrow is further exposed by the holiday mass shooting which rocks the town, setting in motion a chain of events involving (literal) faceless monsters, the black heart of one of the town's most influential Old Money rich men, and a transgression within his own family that hurls Rupert onto an entirely new trajectory. It's a dark web of events that began for LaRocca as a meditation on the American response to shootings and mass death, but eventually evolved into something else.
“The more I think about it, the more I think that this book is an exploration and a rumination on cancel culture, and cancel culture specifically in online spaces,” he said. “I know that sounds far-fetched and maybe a little strange, but the more I talk about it with people, the more I realize it's really about how we inherently dehumanize people who perform actions that we perceive as egregious, that we perceive as worthy of being vilified and destroyed over. This book really touches on our collective mob mentality of going after people and assigning blame to a victim, even a faceless victim or a faceless transgressor.”
It's not far-fetched. Burnt Sparrow is a place where justice always takes precedence over forgiveness, and that justice is often perverted and twisted to meet the needs of the town's most influential residents. To be caught in the middle of that is to be one wrong step away from your town swallowing you whole, and it's something LaRocca has some experience with.
Over the past four years, the author has become one of the most acclaimed and visible writers of extreme horror in the 21st century, the successor to splatterpunk legends like Clive Barker and Kathe Koja, as well as '80s and '90s horror mainstays like Jack Ketchum and Richard Laymon, all of whom LaRocca counts as influences. With that distinction, though, comes no small amount of pushback from readers who simply aren't ready for the violent, depraved behavior of LaRocca's characters. With success came a period of adjustment for LaRocca, as he watched readers vilify his books across social media and review platforms like Goodreads and Amazon.
“I initially was a shrinking violet when it came to this stuff. I was very timid, very shy, very scared of people just not liking me,” LaRocca said. “I'm very fortunate in that I have a very loving, kind support system behind me that encourages me to not look online, not Google myself, not look at the comments, and just focus on the art and focus on creating. But the comments are important. That vitriol and intense reaction to the work is important.
“Apathy is an artist's enemy, I always say, because if you're indifferent to a piece of art, then I feel like the artist has failed you in some way. I think art really needs to compel and move us. It either can compel and move us to love what we see, and it resonates powerfully with us, or we can be disturbed by it and provoked by it and want to push it away or shun the artist, banish the artist. That sort of reaction, that's what I'm going for now. I relish the way that I've been perceived by people. I find myself really interested in some of the conversations that are taking place around my work. I think that's most of what I want to have when I release a book.”
LaRocca has used the pushback from readers, some of which he occasionally shares on social media, as fuel to keep his commitment to his kind of horror: the queer, transgressive narratives he has been producing for years. That commitment means that We Are Always Tender With Our Dead just might be the most singularly brutal read to come out of a major publishing house in 2025, and it got there because LaRocca didn't want to ease up, even when editors wondered if he should.
“I think it really taught me about my intuition and my instincts as a writer more than anything else,” LaRocca said of the Burnt Sparrow writing process. “There was a moment with a particular scene in the first book of this series that my editor did push back a tiny bit on and thought, ‘Oh, maybe we should just leave this hinted at, not be as explicit.' I fought a little bit because of my intuition, because of my instincts, because I was like, ‘No, I need this scene. I want this scene to be a gut punch, and I want it to be as visceral and as upsetting as possible.'”
But beyond the graphic content in We Are Always Tender with Our Dead, there's something beautiful, heartbreaking, and familiar to all of us, and it all comes back to thresholds. Crossing the threshold, both literally and metaphorically, is a vital piece of the Burnt Sparrow puzzle and LaRocca's themes of alienation, depravity, and redemption. It's so important to the book that it's even tied into the title, which conjures the image of a charred, flightless bird forever grounded by fire.
“The whole book is basically centered around thresholds,” LaRocca said. “The whole series is about thresholds. What are your limits? What are you willing to do? What are you willing to cross? What are you willing to sacrifice? What sort of acts are you capable of performing, and where are you capable of going in this world? Birds, for me, exemplify that in that they are unlimited in their range and how free they are.”
He continued, “I really wanted that juxtaposition of something so marvelous and so free, so unfettered with the rotted, cancerous blight of Burnt Sparrow. It's like a steel trap where if you step on it the wrong way, its jaws will clench around you, and you won't be able to be set free. I think a lot of the book plays into that. I think a lot of it plays into the idea of, are we free? Are we actually free? Do we have free will? Are we capable of going beyond these certain limitations? I think that's where the book is really rooted.”
Like his characters in the world of Burnt Sparrow, LaRocca has approached his own career threshold. He called writing the trilogy the “most arduous” project of his career thus far, but now all three books are written. One of horror's brightest rising stars is on the other side of the threshold, ready to show us all his first epic in the genre. Step across with LaRocca, and you'll be rewarded, whether you're a newcomer or a longtime fan.
We Are Always Tender with Our Dead is available September 9 from Titan Books.
